Sion Mills, Muileann an tSiáin, Co. County Tyrone

A company village frozen in Victorian amber, where black-and-white half-timbered cottages line the streets and a cricket pitch holds the memory of one of the most startling upsets in the sport's history.

Sion Mills stands on the River Mourne about five kilometres south of Strabane. Everything in it was put there on purpose. Three brothers - James, John, and George Herdman - converted an old flour mill here in 1835 and built a flax-spinning operation that would eventually employ most of the people who lived in the surrounding area. Because there was no town to speak of, they built one: workers' housing, a school, a church, a cricket ground. The paternalistic industrial village was a recognisable 19th-century form - New Lanark had laid out the template - and the Herdmans followed it.

The visual character of the place came later. From the 1880s onward, the family commissioned William Frederick Unsworth - an English architect who also worked in Stratford-upon-Avon - to redesign the village in a Tudor-revival manner. Half-timbered facades, steep rooflines, latticed windows. Unsworth worked across multiple decades here, transforming the Herdman family house into a half-timbered mansion and finishing with the Church of the Good Shepherd in 1907-1909. The result is a streetscape that reads as consistently as any planned village in Ireland, which is exactly what it is.

The mill ran from 1835 until 2004, when the global collapse of the European linen market - undercut by cheaper production from Asia - ended 169 years of continuous operation and cost 600 jobs. The buildings stand. The weir is intact. The riverwalk goes around the perimeter. Sion Stables, a restored 19th-century stable block on the Melmount Road, now functions as a heritage centre and tearoom, and runs guided walking tours of the village.

The cricket match is the other story, and for anyone who follows the sport it is the reason Sion Mills is known at all outside northwest Tyrone. On 2 July 1969, Ireland played the West Indians - a touring side en route between Test matches - on the Holm Field beside the mill. The West Indies were dismissed for 25 runs in 25.5 overs. Ireland's Doug Goodwin took five wickets for six runs. Ireland won by nine wickets. The London Times put it on the front page. The BBC broadcast the play live. It was, and remains, the lowest total ever conceded by the West Indies in a first-class match. The Holm Field still hosts club cricket for Sion Mills CC, which has been playing on that ground since 1864.