Ballabeg sits in the parish of Arbory, in the sheading of Rushen, in the south of the Isle of Man near Castletown. The name is Manx Gaelic - Balley Beg, the small homestead - and although the modern spelling has drifted, the pronunciation has not. For most of its history the village was simply called Arbory on Ordnance Survey maps, the parish name doing duty for the settlement. In the fourteenth century, William Montagu, 1st Earl of Salisbury and King of Mann, petitioned Pope Urban V for permission to build a Franciscan friary on the island. The Pope granted it - a church or oratory, with a bell tower, bell, cemetery, houses, and other necessary offices. The friary was dissolved under Henry VIII in 1540 during the Dissolution of the Monasteries, and very little of it remains today except the chapel, which has spent the last few centuries serving the much less holy purpose of a barn.

The Arbory parish church of St Columba stands in Ballabeg, its grey pebbledashed walls covering an older whitewashed core. The current building was dedicated in 1759 by Bishop Mark Hildesley, but archaeologists think it sits on the foundations of an early Christian keeill - a tiny Celtic chapel of the kind that dot the Manx landscape. The churchyard has graves running back to the mid-eighteenth century, including those of Captain John Quilliam and the Manx lexicographer Archibald Cregeen, whose Dictionary of the Manks Language - the first dictionary of the language ever published - helped preserve a tongue that has since had to fight for its survival. Each summer the parish celebrates Laa Columb Killey - St Columba's Day - in a field near the station, with Manx music and dance, produce and craft exhibitions, sports, and fancy dress. The festival traditionally alternated between Ballabeg and Colby; in recent years it has settled in Ballabeg alone. COVID-19 cancelled the 2020 edition; it has since returned.

On most days Ballabeg is a quiet farming village whose residents commute to Douglas, fifteen miles north over the central hills. Two weeks of the year, it becomes a grandstand. The A28 - the road from Castletown to Colby - runs through the village at a hairpin junction, and that road forms part of the Billown Circuit, where the Southern 100 motorcycle road races have been run each July since 1955, and the Pre-T.T. Classic races each May. The bikes go through Ballabeg at speeds that the village's farmers find hard to credit. The other annual transformation comes by rail: the Isle of Man Steam Railway's request stop at Ballabeg station, three-foot gauge, opened in 1877 and still operated by Beyer Peacock locomotives a century and a half later. Wave at the driver and the train will stop. Tell the guard at the previous station and it will set you down.

But the village's deepest claim on history lies under a slab in the churchyard. Born in 1771 in nearby Marown, John Quilliam went to sea young, rose through the ranks of the Royal Navy, and at Trafalgar on 21 October 1805 was serving as First Lieutenant of HMS Victory. When the flagship's wheel was destroyed by enemy fire and her steering chains shot away, the ship had to be steered by tiller from the gun-room - and Quilliam directed the operation that kept Victory on her line through the worst of the close-quarter battle. Nelson was killed before the day was out. Quilliam survived, was made post-captain, served as a Member of the House of Keys, and died in 1829. He came home to Arbory to be buried. The grave is marked. The man who steered Nelson's flagship through Trafalgar lies in a churchyard whose walls you can see from the steam train as it pulls into Ballabeg.