Aclare sits in the joint civil and Catholic parish of Kilmactigue, in the hilly country where Sligo meets Mayo. The Inagh river, sometimes spelled Eignagh, runs down out of the surrounding heights and joins the Moy a few kilometres on. The Moy itself is one of the great salmon rivers of Ireland, and the smaller waters that feed it - the Inagh among them - have long mattered both as fishing rivers and as crossings. A ford on flat ground gives the village its name. The country around it is studded with the traces of earlier inhabitants: ringfort sites and ancient enclosures in the townlands of Carns, Lislea and Kilmacteige attest to settlement going back well over a thousand years, possibly two thousand. The Iron Age and early medieval farmers who threw up those circular earthen banks were here before any of the present surnames could have been imagined.

Belclare Castle was a 15th-century tower house associated with the O'Hara clan, one of the dominant Gaelic families of north Connacht. The O'Haras held lands along the upper Moy for centuries, and Belclare was one of several fortified houses they controlled in the area. In 1512, the castle and the village around it became the unlikely meeting point of two distant lordships: the O'Donnells, marching south from Donegal, and the MacWilliam Burkes - the Mac William Iochtar branch of the great Anglo-Norman Burke dynasty - holding Connacht against the encroachment. The annals record the engagement without giving us much detail. What we can infer is that the O'Donnells' interest in pushing south into Connacht was strong enough to bring them this far, and that the local lords were strong enough to make a defence of it. The castle ruin survives today, a stone tooth standing in a field outside the village.

The parish church of Kilmactigue, Our Lady of the Rosary, stands in the village and serves the surrounding Catholic parish. Like many west of Ireland country churches, it is a relatively modest 19th- or early-20th-century building set in a graveyard whose stones go back further. The parish takes its name - Kilmactigue, in Irish Cill Mhic Thaidhg - from an early medieval church dedicated to a son of Tadhg, one of the many small monastic foundations that dotted Gaelic Ireland before the great Norman abbeys arrived. Most of those tiny churches have left only their place-names; in Kilmactigue, the place-name has continued to attach to a working parish church even as the original building has long since vanished. The annual cycle of mass, sacrament and burial keeps the village in time with all the other small parishes of the Connacht hills.

Tommy Fleming, the Irish singer, was born in Aclare. He emerged in the early 1990s as a folk and country tenor and built a career across Ireland, Britain and the United States, often touring with his interpretations of traditional Irish ballads and crossover material. For a place this small to have produced a touring international artist of any significance is not nothing. The Irish village habit of holding tightly to its own makes a returning singer a kind of homecoming; the local paper, the Western People, ran a feature in May 2025 about Fleming returning to perform near where he grew up. Small Sligo villages do not get many things to celebrate in the same way they once celebrated emigration ships and railway openings, but a homegrown musician filling halls in three countries is one of them.

Bus Eireann route 479 runs once a week, on Fridays, linking Aclare to Sligo town via the larger villages of Tourlestrane, Coolaney and Collooney. It is the public-transport pattern of a place whose population has chosen, in successive generations, to keep going elsewhere - working in the cities, returning at weekends, building a quiet but determined sense of belonging that doesn't depend on staying full-time. The Inagh keeps flowing. The Belclare ruin keeps standing. The mass goes on at Kilmactigue. And the rest of the village's life arranges itself in the spaces between.