THE SCOT IN ULSTER
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their brethren of the West of Scotland." [1] But, although Down and Antrim received the greatest number of settlers, the Scots also spread into every part of Ulster in which there was good land to be had; or they took up their abode in the towns which slowly began to rise round the new castle of Belfast; at Londonderry and Coleraine, in the Londoners' territory; and at Donaghadee, and Newtown, and Bangor, and Lisburn, in the Scottish and English settlements of Down and Antrim. Probably none of the colonies which Scotland has sent out more deserves the support and encouragement of the mother country than does this colony in Ulster, for in none have the colonists had to struggle against greater odds. For more than a century the Scots of Ulster were oppressed by laws which deprived them of their civil and religious rights and crippled their trade; while all through the centuries they have been crushed, as they still are, by the presence of an inferior race, whose lower civilisation makes all their ideas of comfort lower, and causes them to multiply with a rapidity which ever presses on the means of subsistence. Thus always facing up to the savage realities of life, these Scots of Ulster are in character more akin to our common forefathers of the seventeenth century, retaining more of their stern Calvinism than the Scots of this generation in the mother country. The establishment and growth of this Calvinistic Church...continue reading »
[1] Ulster Journal of Archaeology, vol. i. p. 3.
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Page 48
The Scot in Ulster:
Sketch of the History of the Scottish Population of Ulster
by John Harrison
1888