Before Cong was a film set, it was a battlefield in the oldest stratum of Irish mythology. In the dreamtime, two branches of the tribes of Nemed fought to rule Ireland. The Fir Bolg held the land. The Tuatha De Danann came to claim it, led by Nuada. The decisive Battle of Moytura, near Cong, lasted four days on Mount Gable. Nuada's right hand was cut off during the fighting, but his side won. The defeated Fir Bolg were given Connacht as a peace offering. Nuada received a silver replacement hand, which under the old laws made him ineligible to be king. Bres was chosen instead, ruled for seven years, then died hunting after one drink too many. Nuada grew a new flesh-and-blood hand and finally became king. A second battle followed on Moytura Ridge in County Sligo, where Bres turned out to be alive and Nuada finally died. The legends were written down between the ninth and twelfth centuries by people who treated them as foundational history.

The O'Connor or Ua Conchobair dynasty rose to be High Kings of Ireland during the period when the Moytura cycle was being written down. Rory O'Connor, the last effective High King, watched the Anglo-Normans seize ground year by year. In 1186 he retired from Tuam to Cong Abbey, returning to power briefly twice more before his death. With his retreat, the centre of Irish political life moved elsewhere. Cong's brief moment at the centre of national affairs was over, and the place was not developed for almost eight hundred years. That neglect preserved the eighteenth-century village more or less intact, which is exactly what made it useful to John Ford when he came looking for a location.

Ford's 1952 film, a romantic comedy starring John Wayne as an Irish-American returning to his ancestral village, was shot largely at Cong and on the grounds of Ashford Castle. It won two Academy Awards including Best Director. Seventy-plus years later, Cong has settled into its role. The Quiet Man Fan Club is still active. Pat Cohan's Bar, named for the fictional pub in the film, exists as a real pub. The bridge from the film, on the road between Oughterard and Maam Cross, draws daily visits. The village is, in the words of one observer, attractive and slightly ersatz. It is also firmly on the tourist circuit, and the question of what comes after the Quiet Man tradition has been asked for decades. The answer so far has been: more Quiet Man tradition. Perhaps, as the local joke runs, Mary Kate's dowry money will finally come in handy.

The Pigeon Hole, a scenic woodland walk that ends at a chasm descending to an underground stream, is where the engineers of the Cong Canal should have looked before they started digging. Water flows from Lough Mask to Lough Corrib through underground channels in the karst limestone, and the entire landscape between the two lakes is riddled with caves. Most are flooded for much of the year, requiring cave-diving to explore. The five-kilometre Cong Canal, completed in the mid-nineteenth century to allow boats from Galway to reach Lough Mask, never functioned as designed because the same underground passages that carve the caves carried the canal water away. The locks and bridges are still there, mostly dry.

Just west of Cong stands Moytura House, built by Sir William Wilde, the prominent surgeon and antiquarian. His son Oscar Wilde spent boyhood and young adult summers here. It is a private home now and not visible from the road. Ten kilometres northeast lies Lough Mask House, also private, also of interest. From 1873 to 1880 this was the home of Captain Charles Boycott, a land agent for Lord Erne's estate. When Boycott tried to raise rents on his tenants in 1880, the tenants and their wider community refused to work for him, trade with him, or speak to him. The strategy had been proposed by Charles Stewart Parnell of the Land League as non-violent resistance to landlord power. Boycott was eventually evacuated to Dublin under armed escort, having spent reportedly 10,000 pounds in government money to save 500 pounds worth of turnips. His name entered the English language as a verb. The film of his story came out in 1947, with Cecil Parker playing the Captain.