Ballylaneen
Ballylaneen is a small village and townland in County Waterford, Ireland, approximately halfway between the villages of Kilmacthomas and Bunmahon on a hill by the River Mahon. Ballylaneen is in a civil parish of the same name.
Features
The village features a Catholic church, a public house, a now closed shop-garage and about seven dwelling houses. It also has St. Anne's Holy Well, where people are said to have gone to pray for cures in the past. The village was larger in the 19th century and gave its name to a parish of its own, which was administered from Mothel, about 10 miles to the north. Today Ballylaneen is part of Stradbally parish, whose parish priest resides in Stradbally, about 4 miles away. The ruins of a large mill can be seen on the river Mahon, east of the village. This was one of five mills, which were sited on the river Mahon. The other four were at Mahonbridge and Kilmacthomas. The present day village, with its church and graveyard, is actually situated in the townland of Carrigcastle, while the old school and old graveyard are located in the townland of Ballylaneen.There are three graveyards associated with the village. The newer of these, adjacent to St Anne's church has one grave of interest: a flat horizontal tombstone commemorating Mark Anthony of Carrigcastle who was an officer in the Royal Navy and served in the battle of Trafalgar. The Anthonys, although catholic, were well-to-do and had a big house and lands in Carrigcastle and Seafield. There are also a few plots of local former Royal Irish Constabulary families in that graveyard although those families have dies out in the area. The second graveyard is outside the present village on the Kilmacthomas road. It is the burial place of the famous poet Tadhg Gaelach Ó Súilleabháin. Regarding the third: the 1837 Ordnance survey shows a burial ground in a stone-walled circular enclosure half a mile to the west of the village named locally as Cathair Breac. It's on a hill overlooking the present day village in an area known as Ballylaneen Upper. According to the Ordnance Survey mapping, it had the ruins of a Roman Catholic church and also a font. It appears this burial ground fell into disuse after the old graveyard was opened in the 1700s according to the dates on the gravestones there. Its church would have fallen into disuse with the building of the present-day church in 1824. No gravestones are visible in the earlier graveyard although the ground is much higher inside the stone enclosure than outside. On another hill in Carrigcastle south-west of the village, there is a subterranean neolithic corbel-roofed chamber, which was accidentally unearthed by a bulldozer during land reclamation in the early 1970s. It was filled in with stones for safety reasons.
The village had its own primary school, originally established under the British National School system. It was closed down in 1957, after which most of the pupils from the area attended Seafield near Bunmahon. The old school building is still standing adjacent to the old graveyard, and was refurbished as a holiday home in the 1990s.
The best-known teacher at the old National School was the Gaelic scholar Tom Walsh around 1910. While he taught there, promising children from other school catchment areas attended, including John Kiely of Stradbally and David Hill of Kilmacthomas. Tom Walsh translated the Neo-Latin epitaph on the tombstone of Tadhg Gaelach Ó Súilleabháin into Munster Irish.
Walsh was succeeded by Tom Cashin NT of Stradbally who taught in Ballylaneen until the school's closure and who features in accounts of the disappearance of Larry Griffin, the missing postman from Kilmacthomas in 1929.
The name Ballylaneen appears in a book title "The Road From Ballylaneen to Skellig Michael" by English writer Michael White, being randomly chosen for its good phonetic sound and its location near the south coast.