The bard's townland
Baile an Bháird
The Irish name Baile an Bháird means the townland of the bard, or the poet. In the Gaelic order before the Plantation, a baile was the basic unit of settlement on a chief's lands, and a bard was a hereditary professional — historian, genealogist, eulogist, satirist, in the pay of a lord and the keeper of the lord's memory. A townland named for a bard usually means it was the land set aside to support one, generations back. By the time English-language records start, the bard is long gone and the name has fossilised. Ballyward keeps the rumour of him in its name and nothing else.
Banbridge to Castlewellan, 1906–1955
The branch line
When the Great Northern Railway extended its Banbridge branch on from Ballyroney to Castlewellan in 1906, the new section ran through the drumlin country east of the upper Bann and a halt was opened at Ballyward to serve the village and the surrounding farms. For nearly half a century the halt connected Ballyward to Banbridge in one direction and Castlewellan and on to Newcastle in the other. The whole branch closed on 2 May 1955 in one of the era's mass closures of rural lines in the north. The station building is gone. The course of the line is readable in the fields if you know where to look — cuttings, embankments, the slight straightness in a hedge that does not belong to the field pattern around it.
The parish around the village
Drumgooland
Ballyward is one village in the civil parish of Drumgooland — Droim gCualann, the ridge of the foothills — which sprawls across the drumlin country between Castlewellan, Rathfriland and the upper Bann. Two parish churches, a couple of Mass-rocks remembered locally, a Gaelic football club, the usual small accumulations of country life. The parish is the unit; the village is a point inside it. Most of what looks like Ballyward on the way through is in fact the wider parish doing the heavy lifting.