First Ahoghill Presbyterian sits on Straid Road. Brookside Presbyterian on Brook Street. Trinity Presbyterian on Church Street. Add St Colmanell's Church of Ireland, also on Church Street, the Gospel Hall on Glenhugh Road, and a Roman Catholic chapel out on the Ballynafie road, and the religious geography of the town comes into focus. The Presbyterians arrived in the 17th century from lowland Scotland during the Plantation of Ulster, and they brought with them a stubborn, splittable theology that produced denomination after denomination. Across the road, the Catholic community held on through generations of disadvantage and danger. The two traditions have lived side by side here for four hundred years, sometimes uneasily, sometimes worse.

On 19 April 1977, William Strathearn was working in his shop on the Ahoghill main street when two men called late at the door, claiming a child needed medicine. He was thirty-nine years old, Catholic, a respected local trader. When he opened up, they shot him dead. The killers were members of the Ulster Volunteer Force - and one of them, Billy McCaughey, was a serving officer in the Royal Ulster Constabulary at the time. He was a uniformed policeman moonlighting as a paramilitary murderer. The Strathearn case became one of the most disturbing of the Troubles, a glimpse of how deep the rot went in the security forces during those years. McCaughey eventually confessed, decades later, and served time for the murder. For the Strathearn family the long quiet of grief has had to do most of the work.

In 2005, sectarian violence returned to Ahoghill in a slower, grinding form. Several Catholic families were attacked in their homes - windows smashed, doors petrol-bombed, threats pushed through letterboxes - and most of them left the town for good. The Northern Ireland Office and the police investigated; loyalist paramilitaries were implicated; the displaced families found new homes elsewhere. Ahoghill was described in the press afterward as a 'staunchly loyalist' village, and that designation has stuck. It is a hard thing to read against the gentle landscape of the surrounding countryside, against the names of farms that go back centuries and the three Presbyterian congregations who have shared the same streets for almost as long. Communities can be both - hospitable to their own and closed to others - and a few months in the news can fix a label that takes a generation to outgrow.

The old Presbyterian church on Straid Road has a tilt to it - visibly sunken to one side, as if the ground beneath it gave up part of its commitment. Local lore links the lean to a 17th-century event, though documentation is thin. What is solid is the building itself, still in use, still leaning, still gathering its congregation every Sunday morning. Ahoghill Thistle F.C. and Ahoghill Rovers F.C. play their fixtures on local pitches. The town's two GAA clubs, St Mary's and Clooney Gaels, draw their players from the Catholic side of the parish. On a normal Saturday in summer you can hear the shouts from both kinds of pitches at once, half a mile apart, and the town goes about its life. The yew forest stays gone.

Ahoghill grew by 3.7% between 2011 and 2021, reaching 3,521 people. It is the kind of population where most residents know most other residents on sight, where the same surnames repeat in the parish registers across four hundred years, where a 'staunchly loyalist' reputation is also, simply, the lived inheritance of generations of Scots-Irish farmers who arrived and stayed and did not leave. Standing on the main street with a coffee from a local shop, looking at the war memorial and the masonry of the old market house, you can feel both the smallness and the weight of the place. Ahoghill is not a tourist town. It does not advertise itself. It is what Mid Antrim looks like when no one is performing - and what towns like this carry forward into the next century is one of the quieter questions Northern Ireland still faces.