Long before motorcycles, the village had another kind of fame. A monastic settlement, founded in the 5th century by Saint Patrick himself according to local tradition, once stood northeast of the present village where St Patrick's Parish Church sits today. Archaeology has dated the site to the 6th century at the latest, and the only above-ground trace is the stump of an Irish round tower, about eleven metres high and divided into three storeys. The land was reputedly granted to Patrick by Fergus Mor MacEarca, the chieftain said to have become the first Christian king in Ireland. One of Patrick's followers, a local man named Olcan, was baptised at Dunseverick on the coast and became Bishop of Armoy. Fifteen centuries later, one of the village primary schools still carries his name.

The river that runs through Armoy is the same River Bush that ends up in Bushmills whiskey, but it has not always taken this route. During the last Ice Age, a wall of glacial debris called the Armoy Moraine was dumped across its old channel north to Ballycastle, forcing the river to swing west through the village instead. The tradition that grew up around this event is more entertaining than the geology textbook version. A giant, the story goes, lifted an L-shaped section of land at Lagge Cross and flung it into the sea, where it became Rathlin Island. The word Lagge means hollow in the old language, and the ground around the church is honeycombed with oval tunnels said to run all the way down to the River Bush, an escape route in case the monastery ever needed one.

Every summer at the end of July, the village fills up with the smell of fuel and the howl of high-revving engines. The Armoy Road Race, billed as 'The Race of Legends', has run on a three-mile circuit of closed public roads through the village since 2009. Up to twenty-seven riders grid up grand prix style on the A44 Hillside Road, just north of the village, and then disappear over the hill in a single chord of noise. The race is direct heir to the Armoy Armada legacy. In the small park beside the river, the paths are laid out in the shape of the North West 200 and the Isle of Man TT circuits, the two big road races that the Armoy riders made their own in the 1970s and 1980s. A mural painted in 2020 by Belfast artist Oliver McParland shows the four young men together, frozen in the moment before they became famous.

Not every story from the village is celebratory. On 15 April 1978, an RUC officer named John Moore was killed by a Provisional IRA booby-trap bomb attached to his car. He was one of more than three thousand people who died in the Troubles, the long and grinding conflict that scarred Northern Ireland for thirty years and reached into villages this small. Armoy carries that history quietly, the way places like this carry a lot of things, woven into the fabric of ordinary life. The bomb was a brief and brutal interruption of a community that has always been mostly about farming, fishing, the bend of the river, and the rumble of bikes coming down Hillside Road.

If you arrive looking for tourist landmarks, the round tower is the obvious one, but the Presbyterian church near the river has its own quiet claim to fame. Its spire is topped by a Viking ship weathervane and has been described, by people willing to stretch a metaphor, as 'a miniature replica of the Eiffel Tower'. Up the road sits Gracehill House, a 1775 Georgian residence with its own 18-hole golf course winding through ponds and woodland. And a few miles to the west stand the Dark Hedges, the spectral avenue of beech trees that became the King's Road in Game of Thrones and now draws coachloads of visitors who often have no idea that the small village down the lane gave the world one of the greatest motorcycle racers who ever lived.