Ballymoney's oldest surviving building is a single church tower, dating from 1637 - built by Sir Randal MacDonnell on the site of an older bishop's house that had stood since at least 1556 and was destroyed in the Irish Rebellion of 1641. The MacDonnells were the dominant Catholic Gaelic family of north Antrim, lords of a region known as 'the Route' that stretched from the Glens to the Bann. After the devastation of the Nine Years' War at the start of the 17th century, Sir Randal invited lowland Scottish settlers onto his lands - mostly Presbyterians, who quickly came into tension both with the dispossessed Catholic Irish and with the Anglican Church of Ireland establishment. The 1637 tower stood through all of it. It stands still. It is the silent witness to almost four centuries of Ballymoney's history.

From 1778, inspired by the American Revolution they had helped to make happen, the people of Ballymoney took a more radical turn. They drilled in Volunteer militias on the town green. They held political conventions. In 1795 the Society of United Irishmen organised in the town, and leading residents - a doctor, a schoolmaster, two attorneys - administered the United Irish oath to anyone who would take it. In June 1798, when the United Irishmen called for insurrection, men of Ballymoney assembled on Dungobery Hill armed with guns, pikes, pitchforks and scythes lashed to sticks. News came that the larger rebel host had been crushed at Antrim town. The Ballymoney rebels dispersed. Their licentiate minister Richard Caldwell, who had commanded them, fled to America - where he died in 1813 fighting in the War of 1812 in a march on Canada. The town's radical tradition went into exile with him.

At the height of the Great Famine in 1847, Ballymoney's workhouse held 870 people - vastly over capacity. Families arrived in such numbers that the institution lost the run of itself. Husbands were separated from wives, mothers from children. The inmates were set to demanding work in exchange for the most basic rations. The records of the Ballymoney Union from those years make hard reading. The workhouse continued in declining use until it finally closed in 1918; the site later became the Route Hospital. The Famine accelerated emigration from the surrounding parishes; what had begun as Presbyterian self-improvement in the 1710s became Catholic survival in the 1840s, and ships kept leaving from Belfast and Derry full of the children of both traditions, each going for their own reasons.

At about 4:30 in the morning on Sunday 12 July 1998, members of the Ulster Volunteer Force petrol-bombed a house in the Carnany estate on the edge of Ballymoney. A whiskey bottle filled with petrol was thrown through a rear window. The mother of the house, Chrissie Quinn, jumped from a first-floor window to escape the fire. Her three sons did not. Richard Quinn was eleven years old. Mark was ten. Jason was nine. They had spent the previous evening helping to build the Eleventh Night bonfire at the Protestant estate where their mother lived with her Protestant partner Raymond Craig. The family was of mixed background - Catholic mother, Catholic father, but the children attended a Protestant state school and Chrissie had raised them as Protestant 'to avoid the hassle'. In the weeks before the attack, five Catholic families in Carnany had received UVF Christmas cards reading 'get out now' and letters containing 9mm bullets. The attack came at the height of the Drumcree standoff - the Orange Order's blocked parade in Portadown - and was widely understood as part of the sectarian intimidation campaign sweeping the loyalist estates that summer. Ian Paisley, the local MP, called the killings 'diabolical' and 'repugnant'. Tony Blair called them 'an act of barbarism'. Senator Ted Kennedy in Massachusetts called for the Orange Order to accept the decision of the Parades Commission. Chrissie Quinn returned to her mother's native Rasharkin to bury her sons. In April 1999, the burnt house in Carnany Park was demolished and replaced with a children's play park as a memorial. Garfield Gilmour, the man who drove the killers to the house, was convicted of murder; his sentence was later reduced to manslaughter on appeal. The three men he named as the actual attackers were never charged.

Joey Dunlop won at the Isle of Man TT a record twenty-six times. They called him the King of the Road, and when he died in 2000 racing in Estonia, fifty thousand people came to Ballymoney for the funeral. His brother Robert Dunlop was killed in practice at the North West 200 in 2008. Robert's sons Michael and William continued the family business; William was killed at the Skerries 100 in 2018. Three Dunlops dead on motorcycles within twenty years. The family came from Ballymoney, and the town's relationship with road racing is, like much else here, a matter of generational continuity that outsiders find hard to imagine. Across the town clock and masonic hall - commissioned by Randal MacDonnell, 6th Earl of Antrim, in 1775 - the names accumulate: footballers, rowers, comedians, surgeons, MPs of every persuasion. Ballymoney has spent four hundred years sending its people out into the world and quietly continuing without them, and the 11,048 residents of the 2021 census are mostly the descendants of those who, for whatever reason, stayed.