A creamery, a village, and a woman who went to Labrador
The building was a working creamery and dairy, established in 1933 on this exact spot. It has been several things to Gleno since — the village kept using it, whatever it happened to be that decade — and it now runs as a farm store, a butchers and a café at the same time. The old milk churn standing inside the door isn't a prop borrowed for the look. It's what the place was for.
Look up as you come in and there's a blue plaque on the whitewashed wall. It's for Martha Craig, born in 1866 at Carneal, just up the glen. She became an explorer in Labrador in the early 1900s, lectured across North America, studied at the Sorbonne, and was the first woman to give a lecture at the University of Salamanca. The Ulster History Circle put the plaque here, on the building at the centre of her village, and unveiled it with her great-great-nephew.
It's a fair summary of the place, that. A small village at the head of a glen, an old dairy that kept being useful, and a local woman who crossed an ocean and came back into the story a hundred and fifty years later, on a wall beside the butchers counter.
Walk to the waterfall first. Come here hungry. Sit at a wooden table with a coffee and the glen out the window, and take the long way home.