Garvagh was founded in the early 17th century by George Canning, an agent for the Ironmonger's Company of London - one of the City livery companies allocated land in Ulster during the Plantation. Canning came from Warwickshire and his descendants would, by the time of the Napoleonic Wars, produce one of Britain's most famous Foreign Secretaries (a different branch). The Garvagh Cannings stayed on their estate, grew the village into a middling market town, and were elevated to the peerage in 1818 as Barons Garvagh. The striking stone clock tower in the middle of Main Street, with its battlements and its prominent timepiece, became the village's emblem and now serves as the district cenotaph. Wide main street, regular block plan, neatly faced sandstone fronts - the layout of a typical Plantation town, evidence of the kind of corporate town-planning that built Ulster's urban grid in the 17th century.

In the walled garden of Garvagh House, where the Canning family seat once stood, there is a granite pillar memorial to Donnchadh Ó hÁmsaigh - Denis Hampson - the great blind Irish harper who lived from 1695 to 1807. Hampson spanned three centuries in a way few people have ever managed; he was already a generation old when the Cannings were grown men, and he was still alive when Napoleon was emperor of the French. He played for George Canning, Dr Bacon and Squire Gage in Garvagh, and they bought him his first harp. Today the Garvagh Museum occupies the walled garden, holding two thousand artefacts that trace life in the Bann Valley from 3000 BC to the early 20th century. Outside the village to the south, the Slagthaverty Dolmen still stands - the kind of Neolithic burial chamber that reminds you of how many layers of human history lie beneath these fields.

On 26 July 1813, a group of Ribbonmen attempted to attack the tavern in Garvagh where local Orangemen were known to drink. The Ribbon Society was a Catholic-defence organisation that had grown out of the sectarian tensions following the United Irish defeat in 1798. The Orangemen inside the tavern fought back. Numbers vary in different accounts but several Ribbonmen died in the skirmish. The event was small. What made it large was the song: 'The Battle of Garvagh', composed within months and circulating in printed broadsides across the north of Ireland, became one of the standard tunes of the Orange tradition. The song treats the events as a glorious Protestant victory. It is still played, still sung, and still resented by parts of the local Catholic community - a perfect example of how a single afternoon can be transformed by folk culture into a permanent fixture of communal identity. The tavern is long gone. The song endures.

Like every village in this part of Ulster, Garvagh was reshaped by the Great Famine. The Catholic and Protestant populations that emerge in the 19th-century records reflect waves of population loss and rural depopulation that continued through the 20th century. The Derry Central Railway opened a station in Garvagh in 1880 - it closed in 1950 - and connected the village to Belfast and Derry by rail for seventy years. Today disused railway bridges are scattered in the surrounding fields, gaunt sandstone arches over empty cuttings. The Garvagh Forest, formerly the Canning estate, covers two square kilometres on the western edge of the village - public woodland now, popular with walkers and mountain bikers, the great trees of the old estate growing into their fourth century.

Garvagh and the surrounding area were drawn into the violence of the Troubles in the late 20th century like every village in Ulster. In August 2009, more than twenty windows were smashed in Catholic-owned businesses in the village in a coordinated overnight attack; the PSNI investigated as sectarian hate crime. The Garvagh and District Development Association (GADDA) had spent the late 1990s and early 2000s modernising the village - new water mains, road resurfacing, street lighting, a community building, funded by Coleraine Borough Council, the Ireland Fund of America, the European Union and the British Government. The improvements helped. The folk-song still gets played at the Twelfth. Garvagh High School closed in 2013 as enrolment declined, and the long-term future of the primary school is also in question. But the village still has its clock tower, its Agivey horseshoe weir, its forest, and its 1,252 stubborn residents - the kind of place that has been hanging on through hard centuries and seems unlikely to stop now.