Ballaugh derives from Balley ny Loghey - the place of the lake. The lake is gone. About three hundred years ago, drainage works cut through the silted-up Lhen Trench, a channel believed to follow a meltwater stream from the end of the last ice age. The water that once filled a basin up to a mile long was drawn off, leaving behind the Ballaugh Curraghs - the wetlands that surround the village to the east. The parish stretches about five miles north to south. It borders Jurby parish, Lezayre, Michael, and the Irish Sea, and it includes part of Sulby Reservoir to the south and part of Bishopscourt to the west - the former residence of the Bishop of Sodor and Man, whose title still presides over a diocese encompassing both the Isle of Man and the Scottish western isles. Ballaugh village has expanded with new housing to the north in recent decades, but the older centre remains compact: a road junction, a church, a bridge, and the pubs and shops needed to sustain about a thousand people.

In 1891, a tenth-century runic cross was found at Ballaugh - an elaborate stone carving that can still be viewed at Ballaugh Old Church. The Old Church sits about a mile and a half north of the current village, in the hamlet of The Cronk on the treen of Ballamona. In 1717, Thomas Wilson, then Bishop of Sodor and Man, added a simple baroque front and lengthened the building by 21 feet, topping the west end with a gable carrying a bell-cote. Galleries went in between 1757 and 1777. When the new parish church - St Mary's, in the modern village - was built, the Old Church fell out of regular use and began to deteriorate. It was restored in 1849 with a new roof, again in 1877, and once more in 1955, and has held regular services ever since. The new church was last renovated in 1893. Two churches, one parish, three centuries of repeated restoration: the kind of accumulation that only happens where a small congregation refuses to let either building become a ruin.

For two weeks each year - during the Isle of Man TT in late May to early June and the Manx Grand Prix in August - Ballaugh becomes one of the most-watched villages on the island. The Snaefell Mountain Course runs straight through it, and Ballaugh Bridge, the small humpback over the Ravensdale River, is one of the most photographed corners on the entire 37.73-mile course. Motorcycles approach at speed, the bridge's hump launches them into the air, and the resulting moment of flight - bike and rider briefly suspended over the asphalt - has been captured in TT photography since before the Second World War. Outside racing fortnights the village reverts to its usual quiet. The A3 Castletown-to-Ramsey road runs through about seven miles west of Ramsey, and during the race closures locals divert via the A10 or A13. The Ballaugh School educates about eighty pupils aged 4 to 11. Most of the time the bridge carries delivery vans and tractors, not racing machines.

From 1879 to 1968 the village was served by Ballaugh Station, on the Manx Northern Railway running between St John's and Ramsey. The station has been demolished, the tracks lifted, and a walking path now follows the route the railway once took - the kind of post-industrial reuse common across the British Isles, where a disused branch line is reborn as a green corridor. There is one other small detail of village history worth keeping. Ballaugh was only connected to the water mains in the early 1950s. Until then, most residents drew their water from local wells, including one in the rear yard of Ellan Vannin, a former coach house with stabling alongside. Mains water arrived only seven years before the TT roared past Ballaugh Bridge for the 1958 races. The image those two facts make together - village wells still in use, motorcycles launching off the bridge - is the truest portrait of mid-twentieth-century Manx life this story can offer.