Claudy, Clóidigh, Co. Derry

A Main Street, a river, and a memorial that names the morning the village can't forget.

Claudy is a small village on the A6 between Derry and Dungiven, sat at the place where the Glenrandal flows into the Faughan. A Main Street, a couple of churches, two primary schools and a college, a few shops. The Sperrins rise behind it. Derry city is twelve minutes down the road. Most days that's the shape of the place - rural service centre, river valley, parish.

And then there is the morning of 31 July 1972. Three car bombs went off in quick succession on Main Street and Church Street, mid-morning on a Monday. Nine civilians were killed, including three children. A telephone warning had been attempted from Dungiven but the lines were down - an earlier IRA bomb had destroyed Claudy's telephone exchange. The Provisional IRA never publicly admitted responsibility; a 2010 Police Ombudsman report concluded that the RUC believed a local Catholic priest, Father James Chesney, to be the IRA's South Derry Brigade quartermaster and director of operations, and that senior officers, the Northern Ireland Office and the Catholic hierarchy colluded in moving him to a parish in Donegal rather than prosecuting him. The bombing has the shorthand name 'Bloody Monday'. Nobody has ever been charged.

What you notice if you stop is how ordinary the village still is. Children on bikes. The post office. A bronze figure on Main Street by the sculptor Elizabeth McLaughlin, a kneeling girl, the names cast underneath. The community holds an ecumenical service every year on the anniversary. Locals will talk about it if you ask, and they won't if you don't, and either way is fine.

The reason most people come through Claudy is to go somewhere else - Ness Country Park for the waterfall, Learmount Forest for the walks, the Sperrins for the long view. That's honest. Treat the village as the doorway it is, but stop on Main Street for ten minutes. Read the names. Then drive on.