Ballaugh occupies a three-mile stretch of the north-western coast of the Isle of Man, in the traditional North Side division and the sheading of Michael. The parish is roughly three miles wide and covers about nine square miles in total. The south-eastern corner is hilly; the rest is low ground, including a substantial slice of the Curragh wetlands that gave the parish its identity. Local government runs through a parish district with elected Commissioners, and since 1993 the Captain of the Parish - a traditional Manx office that combines ceremonial duty with a few residual legal responsibilities - has been Charles Edgar Cowin. Politically the parish belongs to the Ayre and Michael constituency in the House of Keys, electing two members. The 2016 census counted 1,032 residents, a one percent decline from 1,042 in 2011. For an agricultural district on a small island, the population has stayed remarkably stable across centuries.

In 2006 the Ballaugh Curragh became the first wildlife site on the Isle of Man to be designated under the Ramsar Convention - the international treaty that protects wetlands of global importance. The qualification is technical, but the reasons are concrete. The curragh contains excellent examples of the wetland habitats characteristic of the island and the region: bog pools, marshy grassland, birch woodland, modified bog, and the willow scrub that gives this kind of landscape its Manx name. The bird life is what carries the international weight. The site supports, on occasion, the largest winter roost of hen harriers in Western Europe - a raptor whose population is declining sharply across most of Britain. It is also a breeding habitat for the corn crake, a small ground-nesting bird whose secretive rasping call was once the soundtrack of European haymeadows and which has now vanished from most of its former range. In 2005, the Isle of Man Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry also designated the curragh as an Area of Special Scientific Interest under Manx law. Three partners share its stewardship: Curraghs Wildlife Park, Manx National Heritage, and the Manx Wildlife Trust.

Curraghs Wildlife Park sits one mile east of Ballaugh village, occupying part of the same wetland complex. Most of the park is arranged in geographical sections, representing different continents and the animals that live there; the central area carries more specific exhibits. The combination is unusual - a working zoo and a Ramsar wetland sharing land - but it reflects how Manx conservation has tended to operate, with multiple uses layered over the same ground. Walk the parish today and you can read its history in fragments. The hills rise gently in the southeast. The Curragh stretches across the lower ground, threaded with peat-dark drainage channels that descend from the disappeared lake of three centuries ago. Cattle and sheep graze fields whose boundaries have not changed much since the parish was first surveyed. Research continues into the social history of Glen Dhoo, an isolated and now-deserted glen tucked into the parish's southern edge, whose human story is only beginning to be reconstructed. Ballaugh is a small place that holds large amounts of habitat, language, and quiet time.