In the mid-1800s, a woman named Jane Ross sat at her window on Main Street in Limavady and listened. A blind itinerant fiddler named Jimmy McCurry was playing in the street below - he made his living that way, and his tunes were the old tunes, passed down from fiddler to fiddler. Ross was musically literate, with a notation system practised enough to capture what she heard. She wrote down the melody he played that day. She sent the manuscript to Belfast collector George Petrie, who included it in his 1855 collection of ancient Irish music as the Londonderry Air. Around 1913 the English lawyer Frederic Weatherly added words to the tune. He called the song Danny Boy. It became one of the most internationally recognised songs ever written. The melody itself - if McCurry indeed composed it, which is disputed - was probably much older. Either way, it passed through Limavady before it became famous. There is a plaque above Ross's old house.

William Ferguson Massey was born on Irish Green Street in Limavady in 1856. His family emigrated to New Zealand when he was a teenager. Massey became a farmer in Auckland, then a politician, then leader of the Reform Party, then - from 1912 to 1925 - the 19th Prime Minister of New Zealand. He held office longer than almost any other person in New Zealand history. Massey Avenue in Limavady is named for him. The birthplace house still stands. The story is a useful reminder that Ulster's diaspora was vast and politically consequential - Sir Robert Garrioch Hart led colonial customs in China, Charles Logue built Boston's Fenway Park, William Porter served as Attorney General at the Cape of Good Hope. Limavady alone, a town of fewer than twelve thousand people, produced statesmen who shaped countries on the far side of the world.

In 1896, a ploughman working a field near Limavady turned up a hoard of Iron Age gold. The Broighter Gold collection - named for the townland where it was found - included an exquisitely worked gold torc, a model boat the size of a child's palm complete with tiny gold oars, a gold bowl, and several smaller items. The work dates to roughly the first century BC. The torc is one of the finest examples of Celtic La Tène-style craftsmanship ever found in Ireland, with hammered relief decoration and a buffer-terminal closure. After a famous legal dispute about ownership - the British Museum had it for decades, until an Irish lawsuit reclaimed it for Dublin - the collection now resides in the National Museum of Ireland. It returned to Limavady briefly in 2013, on temporary display in the town where it had been found 117 years earlier.

On 3 July 1987, Richard Branson and the Swedish engineer Per Lindstrand became the first humans to cross the Atlantic Ocean in a hot air balloon. They launched from Sugarloaf, Maine, intending to land somewhere in the British Isles. They came down somewhere in the British Isles. Not anywhere they had planned. The Virgin Atlantic Flyer descended through bad weather over Northern Ireland, jettisoned propane tanks at the wrong moment, and made a hurried landing in a Limavady-area field. The two men climbed out, slightly battered, and discovered they had survived the first transatlantic balloon crossing in history. Limavady had not been on the flight plan. The townspeople were nonetheless welcoming. Branson, in his memoir, recalled being offered a cup of tea before anyone discovered who he was.

Beneath the town flows the River Roe, which once powered linen mills and tanneries and which now flows through the Roe Valley Country Park - a wooded gorge with restored mill buildings, riverside walks, and the old generating station that gave Limavady some of the earliest electric street lighting in Ireland. The Limavady Distillery, founded on the banks of the Roe in 1750, was once one of the major Irish whiskey producers. The original closed in the 1920s. A new Limavady Distillery opened in 2023, reviving the tradition. RAF Limavady, just to the north of town, served as a Coastal Command base during the Second World War; aircraft from here patrolled the Atlantic against the U-boats whose wrecks now lie off Donegal. The base closed in 1958, and the land returned to agriculture. The Roe Valley remains, the dog's leap still echoes in the town's name, and a tune that an itinerant fiddler once played in the street belongs now to the whole world.