Corn to flour, 1800s to 1950s, then seventy years dark
The mill that became a distillery
The Ahascragh mill ground grain into flour from the early nineteenth century until the 1950s, then stood derelict in the middle of the village for about seventy years. Gareth and Michelle McAllister bought the complex and reopened it as Ahascragh Distillery, billed as Ireland's first zero-emissions whiskey and gin distillery, powered by renewable energy. It runs guided grain-to-glass tours and a visitor centre, with products including the Clan Colla and UAIS whiskeys and Xin gin. Tours are bookable rather than walk-in, so check ahead. It is the reason most outside visitors come to the village, and the reason the old mill is still standing.
A parish older than the Annals' record of 788 AD
St Cuan and the ford
The village is named for the ford - Áth Eascrach - where an old road crossed the river, and the parish is named for St Cuan, whose death the Annals of the Four Masters set down in 788 AD. St Cuan's Well lies to the north-east, and the townlands of Weston and Ahascragh East and West carry ringfort, souterrain and holy-well remains. None of it is dramatic to look at. But it tells you this was a settled, working place for well over a thousand years before anyone thought to grind whiskey out of the mill.
The baker's son who became Vogue's greatest living milliner
Philip Treacy's village
Philip Treacy, the haute-couture hat designer, was born in Ahascragh in 1967, one of eight children of the village baker. He went on to London, dressed the heads of royalty and the front rows of Paris and Milan, and was called by Vogue perhaps the greatest living milliner. There is no Treacy trail or museum in the village - this is not that kind of place - but the parish is entitled to the claim, and locals will make it if asked. The singer Seán 'ac Donncha also came from the area, and the politicians Eamon Gilmore and Mary Harney have family roots in the parish.
Castlegar and Clonbrock, the two big houses
The estate houses
Two Anglo-Irish estates shaped the parish: Castlegar, seat of the Mahon family, and Clonbrock, seat of the Dillons, whose house was built in the 1780s and is now a ruin. Estate villages like Ahascragh were laid out and run from such houses, and much of the 19th-century fabric you walk past - the line of the street, the churches, the planting - is a legacy of that arrangement. The houses are largely gone or private now, but their shape is still on the map.