Ballingall

Ballingall # FAL S NO242090 1 50m

Ballingall 1821 Falkland Wood Plan/1821 [Ballingall or Wilderness]
Ballingall 1828 SGF

If this is a genuine G name, then it probably represents G baile nan gall ‘farm of the foreigners’. We should always bear in mind, however, the possibility of gall ‘pillar-stone’ (in Old Irish) and ‘rock, stone’ (modern Gaelic) (Morgan 2005, 9). In either case, however, since the name appears so late in the record it may be a transferred name from one or other of the older established farms called Ballingall in KTT or LSL, both within a radius of 8 km; alternatively it may be a re-interpretation of a different name influenced by one or other of these farm-names (see below). The name survives in OS Pathf. Ballingall Burn FAL/SLO, which forms the southern boundary of the lands of Cash SLO and joins the Falkland Burn to flow into the Eden near Dunshelt AMY. On Blaeu (Pont) East Fife it is marked as Wood B<urn>. On both the Falkland Wood Plan/1821 and SGF (1828) a small farmstead named Ballingall is marked on the banks of this burn beside the lands of Woodmill FAL (Wood Miln 1821). It does not appear on any subsequent map. The OS Name Book says nothing about the origin of this name, but, after describing the whole course of the burn, states that ‘it bears this name from Cash Wood to Wood Mill’ i.e. along that stretch beside which the maps of the 1820s show the settlement of Ballingall.

    By 1909 the field where Ballingall lay is called Boerland (Falkland Cropping Book). Three fields on Wester Cash SLO which march with the Ballingall Burn were called East, Mid and West Baglie (ibid.).[63] These could be a development of Ballingall, or Ballingall could be a re-interpretation of Baglie (see above).

    In the Sasines 1781–1820 there is a place called Mingal(l) mentioned in eight separate entries, the first one being in 1788, no. 1856. Now obsolete, Mingal(l) formed part of the lands of Peathill KTT, which lay two km due east of the lost Ballingall farmstead, in the flat, marshy land around Lathrisk KTT. However, the lands of Peathill also stretched into FAL, and Mingal(l) probably lay on the modern farm of Woodmill FAL (see Peathill KTT for more details). It might just represent mòine (nan) gall, ‘peatmoss of (the) gall’. Unfortunately I have been unable to trace any earlier forms of either Ballingall or Mingal(l).

This place-name appeared in printed volume 2