Ballinalack
Béal Átha na Lice

The Ireland's Hidden Heartlands
STOP 03 / 03

Béal Átha na Lice · Co. Westmeath

A bridge, a service stop, and one of Ireland’s biggest undeveloped orebodies under the fields.

Ballinalack is the kind of place the road forgets it has gone through. The bridge over the Inny, a forecourt, a few cottages set back from the verge, and the N4 already pulling you toward Edgeworthstown before you have finished reading the name on the sign. The village proper had 161 people at the last census. The townland has had a bridge here since long before anyone was counting.

The river is the older story. The Inny flows down out of Lough Sheelin in Cavan, threads through Lough Iron a few kilometres north of the village, and runs on toward the Shannon at Lough Ree. Ballinalack — Béal Átha na Lice, the mouth of the ford of the flagstone — is named for the crossing, not the settlement. The five-arched bridge replaced the ford. The N4 replaced the bridge’s job. The river still does what rivers do.

The strange story is what is under the fields. In 1967 prospectors drilled into the limestone here and found one of the largest undeveloped lead and zinc orebodies in Ireland — a near-surface body of Carboniferous-age mineralisation that has been sitting on geologists’ maps ever since. Companies have come and gone. The drill rigs reappear every few years. So far, the ore has stayed where it has been for 350 million years. It is a strange thing to drive over without knowing it is there.

Population

161 (2022 census)

Coords

53.6447° N, 7.4456° W

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At a glance.

Three things every local will eventually mention. Read these and you've already understood more than most day-trippers do.

01 The crossing

Bridge of five arches over the Inny.

The River Inny runs out of Lough Sheelin and on through Lough Iron a few kilometres north. Ballinalack is where the Mullingar–Longford road crosses it, and has been crossing it for centuries.

Stories & lore → 02 The N4

A pause on the road north.

Halfway between Mullingar and Edgeworthstown on the way to Longford and Sligo. A filling station, a couple of houses, the bridge, a turn for Castlepollard. Most people who pass through never realise they have.

Getting there → 03 Underneath

A lead-zinc deposit nobody mined.

Drillers found a major zinc and lead orebody under the limestone here in 1967. It has been measured, modelled and drilled around for nearly sixty years. It has never been opened.

Stories & lore →

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Stories & lore.

The reason to come back. The things every local will eventually tell you about, usually after the second pint.

Why the village exists

The bridge over the Inny

The River Inny rises in Lough Sheelin and runs west through Lough Iron and on to the Shannon. The flagstone ford that gave the village its name — Béal Átha na Lice — was eventually replaced by a five-arched stone bridge, and the road from Mullingar to Longford settled on this crossing. The 1837 Topographical Dictionary describes the village simply: on the banks of the Inny, with a bridge of five arches, on the road from Mullingar to Longford. It has been that, more or less, ever since.

A mine that never opened

The orebody

In 1967 exploration drilling identified a major zinc-lead deposit in the Carboniferous limestone beneath the fields around Ballinalack. The numbers, when they came in, were serious: a near-surface inferred resource of millions of tonnes, grading several percent zinc with lead besides, sitting between roughly ten and three hundred metres down. By the standards of the Irish ore field — the same belt that built the Tara mine at Navan — it was a real find. It has been studied, modelled in 3D, and drilled around for nearly sixty years, and at the time of writing it has still not been mined. The current operator, a junior exploration company, has kept the project alive with step-out holes a few kilometres up the trend. The fields look like ordinary Westmeath fields. They are not.