We give a natural definition of rowmotion for $321$-avoiding permutations, by translating, through bijections involving Dyck paths and the Lalanne--Kreweras involution, the analogous notion for antichains of the positive root poset of type $A$. We prove that some permutation statistics, such as the number of fixed points, are homomesic under rowmotion, meaning that they have a constant average over its orbits. Our setting also provides a more natural description of the celebrated Armstrong--Stump--Thomas equivariant bijection between antichains and non-crossing matchings in types $A$ and $B$, by showing that it is equivalent to the Robinson--Schensted--Knuth correspondence on $321$-avoiding permutations permutations.