placenamesBallee
Béal Ia
School records and a distinctive geological exposure reveal aspects of the wider parish beyond its village churches.
The name
A reliable full-name meaning has not been established here. The recorded Irish and English forms are given without an unsupported translation.
Recorded forms
- Béal Ia · Irish · main form
- Ballee · English · main form
Place & story
Schools in the farming parish
Samuel Lewis described Ballee in 1837 as cultivated throughout, without bog or waste ground. Its parochial school taught forty boys and twenty-eight girls, supported jointly by the rector and Hugh Johnson of London. Four private schools enrolled another 113 boys and ninety girls. These are figures for separate kinds of schooling across the parish, rather than a count of pupils in one village school. [2]
The rock outcrops at Slievenagriddle
On Slievenagriddle’s southern flank, geologists identified an unusual outcrop of markfieldite, a type of igneous rock. First mapped as syenite in 1871, it was reclassified by Patterson in 1942. The Earth Science Conservation Review records his interpretation that the exposed rock formed the upper part of a larger intrusion beneath the surface. Later research identified two further nearby outcrops and suggested that the three belonged to a related east–west geological system. [3]
Geographic information
- Place type
- Civil parish
- County
- Down
- Barony
- Lecale Lower
- Coordinates
- 54.30822, -5.64899 (approximate)
- Mapped area
- 23.13 km²
- Logainm ID
- 65756 ↗
Sources & further reading
- Logainm.ie — Ballee. Place names and geographic record, licensed under CC BY 4.0.
- Ballee or Bally, Topographical Dictionary of Ireland1837 · Samuel Lewis
- Slievenagriddle: Earth Science Conservation Review site751 · I. Enlander, M. Dempster and P. Doughty, National Museums NI
- Slievenagriddle viewed from Ballystokes, County Down, as photographed in February 2010 illustration: based on a View of Slievenagriddle from Ballystokes by Dean Molyneaux. AI-assisted watercolour and ink adaptation; cream paper margins added, incidental clutter omitted and fine details simplified. Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0.
Name record retrieved 2026-10-25 · Source record modified 2019-10-08. How this page was prepared.