An Phailis · Co. Offaly
A crossroads village named after its own pub, and the field that hosts Ireland's biggest one-day show.
Blue Ball is a small crossroads village nine kilometres south-west of Tullamore, where the N52 to Birr crosses the R357. On the map and in the records it is Pallas - An Phailis in Irish, the townland name - in the civil parish of Killoughy. But almost nobody calls it that. The village is called Blue Ball after the pub that has traded at the crossroads since 1897, one of those Irish places where the public house came first and the settlement took its name from the sign over the door.
Most of the year it is exactly what it looks like: a junction, a pub, a scatter of houses, and Pallas Lough sitting quietly to the east. There is no tourist infrastructure, no shops trading on the name, no reason for a coach to stop. It is farming country, the flat fertile middle of Offaly, the kind of place that does its living away from the road.
And then there is the second Sunday in August. The Tullamore Show - despite the name - is held here, on the Butterfield Estate at Blueball, and on that one day around sixty thousand people descend on the village for the biggest one-day agricultural show in the country. Livestock, machinery, home industries, show-jumping, the lot. The next morning the field is empty again and Blue Ball goes back to being a crossroads with a pub.
