placenamesBallysallagh
Baile Salach
South of Dromore, Ballysallagh’s recorded history runs from seventeenth-century leases to the changing households and farm buildings of a rural townland.
The name
These Irish name elements are associated with this record in the Logainm glossary.
An element’s translation is a clue, rather than a complete explanation of the name. Its form and meaning depend on local history and the full Irish name.
Recorded forms
- Baile Salach · Irish · main form · validated name
- Ballysallagh · English · main form
- Ballysallough · English · main form · local name
Place & story
Two halves of the townland
Bishop Buckworth’s report on Dromore diocese in 1622 divided Ballysallagh between two leases. One half was combined with Drumnaghadowan and let to Edmond O’Gullogher for 21 years at an annual rent of £16. The other half, together with Dromiller, was leased to Lawrence M’Enering for the same term at £17 a year. The paired entries show how land here was administered alongside neighbouring townlands within the bishop’s estate. [2]
A farmhouse rebuilt around 1900
The farmhouse at 27 Ballysallagh Road replaced the single-storey mud buildings recorded on its site in the 1830s. The Department for Communities dates the present house to around 1900; it appears on the 1903 Ordnance Survey map. Rubble stone walls, red-brick dressings and sash windows distinguish its two-storey frontage. The Martin family occupied the holding through these changes and acquired ownership under the Land Acts in 1913. A 1930s valuation described a well-built house with three bedrooms, a kitchen, pantry and scullery. [3]
A smaller community in 1926
The 1926 census counted 122 people in Ballysallagh, compared with 146 in 1911. There were 35 inhabited houses and six empty ones, across a townland of just over 572 acres. These figures describe a dispersed rural community rather than a large village. Thirty-five private families occupied 138 rooms, providing a household-scale counterpart to the older estate leases and the surviving history of individual farms. [4]
Geographic information
- Place type
- Population centre
- County
- Down
- Barony
- Iveagh Lower, Lower Half
- Civil parish
- Dromore
- Coordinates
- 54.39289, -6.12153 (approximate)
- Logainm ID
- 1413219 ↗
Sources & further reading
- Logainm.ie — Ballysallagh. Place names and geographic record, licensed under CC BY 4.0.
- Dromore: An Ulster Diocese, Appendix III, Buckworth’s report 1622, printed page 70 · E. D. Atkinson, digitised by G. Damien Kerr; University College Cork
- Historic Buildings Record HB17/14/021:27 Ballysallagh Road · Department for Communities, Historic Environment Division; record reproduced by TreeAlive
- Census of Northern Ireland 1926: County Down, table 3, page 9 · Government of Northern Ireland; Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency
Name record retrieved 2026-10-25 · Source record modified 2019-10-08. How this page was prepared.