An Franciscan ruin, 1465
Kilcrea Friary and the lament
About 5km from Aherla, near Ovens off the N22, stands Kilcrea Friary - a Franciscan house founded in 1465 by Cormac Láidir MacCarthy, Lord of Muskerry, who also built the tower-house castle across the river. MacCarthy was killed in 1494 and is buried in the friary he founded. The ruin is roofless but substantial - nave, tower, cloister - and free to wander, which few people do. Its most-visited grave belongs to Art Ó Laoghaire, the eighteenth-century captain shot dead in 1773, whose widow Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill wrote the Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire, the greatest lament in the Irish language. His headstone is inside the friary walls. If you stop at Aherla for anything, stop here.
Siobhán McSweeney, born 1977
Sister Michael is from here
The actress Siobhán McSweeney, who plays the gloriously deadpan Sister Michael in Derry Girls and won a BAFTA for it, was born and raised in Aherla. It is the kind of fact that the village wears lightly and the rest of the country finds delightful - that one of the sharpest comic performances on Irish television came out of a small commuter village in the Bride valley. McSweeney has spoken warmly of growing up here.
A medieval church on a north slope
Cill Mhathnáin at Kilbonane
South of the village toward Cloughduv, a ruined medieval church and graveyard sit on a north-facing slope - Cill Mhathnáin, the church of Mathnán, which gives the old civil parish of Kilbonane its name. It is a quiet, unsignposted spot down a side road, the sort of ruin you find by asking rather than by following a brown sign. Worth it only if you like your heritage with no car park and no interpretation panel.