The town you see today was largely laid out in the 19th century by Francis Turnly, a former merchant returned from the Far East, who decided the village needed a small piece of architectural drama. In 1817 he built the Curfew Tower at the central crossroads, a stout sandstone structure designed to confine 'riotous prisoners', and gave its garrison job to a single army pensioner named Dan McBride. McBride's armoury, according to the records, consisted of one musket, a bayonet, a brace of pistols, and a thirteen-foot pike. The tower still stands and is now owned by the Scottish artist and musician Bill Drummond, late of the band KLF. Around it, the four original Georgian streets of the village remain mostly intact, which earned Cushendall designation as Northern Ireland's second Conservation Area in 1973.

On a hillside in Lubitavish, off the road from Cushendall to Ballymoney, sits a megalithic court cairn locally known as Oisin's Grave. The tradition holds that this is the burial place of Oisin, the warrior poet of the old Irish sagas, son of Fionn mac Cumhaill and husband of Niamh of the Golden Hair. The site is real and impressive: a sixteen-foot-wide court opens into a chambered gallery. But the dating tells a different story. The cairn is roughly five thousand years old, far older than the literary Oisin, which means whoever lies under those stones predates the heroes of the Fianna by millennia. In 1989 a second stone cairn was raised beside it in memory of the poet John Hewitt, the modern Glens poet who walked these hills and wrote about them in plain, unsentimental verse.

A short walk north of the village, the ruins of Layd Church stand on a cliff path looking out to sea. Possibly Franciscan in origin and partly dating from the 13th century, Layd served as a parish church from 1306 until around 1790, an unbroken five-century run. It was one of the principal burial grounds of the MacDonnell family, the Scottish-Irish clan who held the Glens for centuries from their seat at Glenarm. Inside the old churchyard stands a stone cross memorial to Dr James MacDonnell, who organised the last great Belfast Festival of Harpists in 1792 and pioneered the use of chloroform in surgery. By the gate sits a holed stone, and nearby are two flat 'corp stones' on which coffins were rested during funeral processions. The path between vaults and headstones runs straight up the cliff edge.

Cushendall's history is not all glens and harpists. On the night of 23 June 1922, during the early years of the Northern Irish state, several lorries of Ulster Special Constabulary personnel and British Army soldiers drove into the village to enforce a nightly curfew. The USC opened fire on a crowd of onlookers and killed three Catholic men: James McAllister, John Gore, and John Hill. The constabulary claimed they had been ambushed by the Irish Republican Army and returned fire. A British government inquiry concluded the constabulary's account was false, but the report was suppressed and only declassified almost a century later. The names of the three men are not on a national monument anywhere. They are remembered here, where they lived and died, and where the wrong they were done was finally put on the record.

Today Cushendall is a working village with strong sporting passions. The local hurling club, Ruairi Og GAC, founded in 1906, plays at Pairc Mhuire and has been Ulster champions eleven times. In 2016 they reached the All-Ireland Senior Club Hurling final, losing to Na Piarsaigh of Limerick in a close match that the village still talks about. Down at Red Bay, the Cushendall Sailing & Boating Club has been running learn-to-sail courses since 1951. And every August, during the week-long Heart of the Glens Festival, hardy locals attempt the Lurig Run, a 3.5-mile race that includes a 1,500-foot climb straight up the face of Lurigethan Mountain. Watching the runners go up that wall, then collapse onto the beach below, is part of what now passes for entertainment in a place that has always made its own.

One last connection. Thomas D'Arcy McGee, who would go on to become one of the Fathers of Canadian Confederation, spent his childhood here in Cushendall when his father was posted to the Coast Guard Service. McGee emigrated to Canada, became a politician, helped negotiate the union of the British North American colonies in 1867, and was assassinated in Ottawa the following year, the only Canadian federal politician ever to be murdered. He carried these glens with him to his death. From Lurigethan, on a clear day, you can see across to the Mull of Kintyre and feel the same outward pull that took him - and so many others - across an ocean to start something new.