Limavady, just down the road, takes its name from the leap of a dog (Léim an Mhadaidh). Dungiven's name has a different etymology - probably from dún geimhin, the fortified place of the hides - and a different mythology rooted in the clan that ruled here for five centuries. Between the 1100s and the 1600s, the Ó Catháin family controlled the area, vassals to the O'Neill kings of Tyrone. Their fortress at Dungiven was destroyed during the Plantation, but their tomb survives. Cooey na Gall O'Cahan - Cuchonnacht of the Foreigners, named for his interactions with the Norman incomers - was laid to rest at the priory in 1385. His effigy, in chain mail, still lies on the slab. Six gallowglass warriors are carved in arched niches below him, ready in stone to serve their chief in the next world.

The Augustinian priory was built in the 1100s on the foundations of older churches - St Nechtan may have founded the first around 679 AD, and tradition gives the second to St Patrick himself in the fifth century. Outside the ruins, beside the thorn thicket hung with cloth, sits a bullaun stone with a polished basin in its top. Bullaun stones appear across Ireland - their original purpose is debated; they may have been used for grinding grain or herbs, or for ritual washing. By the time anyone began writing about them, they had long since become folk-medicine objects. The Dungiven bullaun is said to cure warts. The water collects in the basin from the rain. You rub the affected hand in the basin, tie a rag to a thorn branch, and walk away.

Benbradagh rises above Dungiven to the north-east - 1,525 feet of heather-clad upland that has acted as the town's natural backdrop since the first hunter-gatherers walked these valleys. The Glenshane Pass winds through the Sperrin Mountains nearby, climbing to over a thousand feet. In winter the pass can become impassable; in summer it offers some of the finest hill walking in Ulster. The American military once based an observation post on Benbradagh during the Second World War. The mountain has also lent its name to Dungiven's local council electoral area. From the summit, on a clear day, you can see Lough Foyle to the north-west and the dark wedge of the Atlantic beyond it.

Dungiven has produced more singers than most towns its size. Cara Dillon, the folk singer with the silver voice and international following, was born here in 1975. Her cousin Mary Dillon, another folk singer of distinction, is also from the town. Eoghan Quigg, who reached the X Factor finals in 2008, grew up here. The musical inheritance flows through the local hurling club, named for Kevin Lynch - a Dungiven man who died on hunger strike at the Maze Prison in 1981, aged 25. His club, formerly known as the Dungiven Hurling Club, was renamed Kevin Lynch's Hurling Club after his death. They have won the Derry Senior Hurling Championship a record twenty-two times. In 1997, the local Gaelic football club St Canice's won the Ulster Senior Football Championship for the only time in their history.

During the Troubles, seven people lost their lives in or near Dungiven in connection with the conflict. Six were members of the security forces. The one civilian was Francis McCloskey, found beaten to death in disputed circumstances during street disturbances in July 1969. The police had been called to respond to riots. Some historians regard McCloskey as the first person killed in the modern phase of the Troubles, which would not formally end until the 1998 Belfast Agreement. Three thousand more would die in the years between. The town remembers him. There is a memorial. The town also remembers John Mitchel - the 19th-century Irish patriot whose writings inspired the Young Ireland movement and who was born at Camnish, between Dungiven and Burnfoot. The Mitchel Park area is named for him.