THE SCOT IN ULSTER
THE SCOT IN COUNTY DOWN
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ing population, for in those days food did not necessarily come where there were mouths to consume it. Then the Scots, true to the race from which they spring--for "Norman, and Saxon, and Dane are we"--began to go forth, like the northern hordes in days of yore, the women and the children along with the bread-winners, and crossed the seas, and settled in new lands, and were "fruitful, and multiplied and replenished the earth," until the globe is circled round with colonies which are of our blood, and which love and cherish the old "land of the mountain and the flood." It was in the beginning of the seventeenth century that the first of these swarms crossed the narrowest of the seas which surround Scotland; it went out from the Ayrshire and Galloway ports, and settled in the north of Ireland. The numbers which went were large. They left Scotland at a time when she was deeply moved by the great Puritan revival. They took with them their Scottish character and their Scottish Calvinism. They founded the Scottish colony in Ulster. Thus it comes to pass "that the foundation of Ulster society is Scottish. It is the solid granite on which it rests." [1] The history of this Scottish colony seems worth telling, for it is a story of which any Scotsman at home or abroad may be proud. Its early history is quaint and interesting; there is much of suffering and oppression in the story of the succeeding years, but there are flashes of bright-...continue reading »
[1] See an article in 'Fraser's Magazine' on "Ulster, " July-December 1876, p. 220.
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Page 3
The Scot in Ulster:
Sketch of the History of the Scottish Population of Ulster
by John Harrison
1888
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