Since the medieval period there had been a continuous small scale migration from Scotland to Ireland, many of the migrants being ‘gallowglasses’ or mercenary Highland soldiers. From the fourteenth century onwards the Scottish Clan Donald significantly increased its power and influence in the western Highlands and Islands. The head of Clan Donald was the Lord of the Isles. The territory controlled by Clan Donald extended to Ireland when, through marriage, it established a branch in County Antrim in the fifteenth century. Scotland’s King James IV successfully reduced the power of the Lordship of the Isles--which he abolished in 1493--and the power of Clan Donald diminished. Clan Campbell began to expand its lands in Argyll, where the MacDonalds had once been supreme. This contributed towards an exodus of MacDonalds and their septs to Ireland.
The settlement by Scots in Ireland during the early modern period began in the late sixteenth century. Turlough Luineach O’Neill married Agnes Campbell, widow of James McDonnell of the Glens and the Isles, and resulting from this in 1580 a force of 2000 ‘Redshanks’, [Highland Scots mercenaries], came to Ireland. The objective was to support the native Irish in their struggle against the Tudor English, who were attempting to gain control of the whole island of Ireland. These fighting men differed from the later Scottish immigrants in that they were Gaelic-speaking Highland Catholics. These men are likely to have been recruited in Argyll and other territories controlled by Clan Donald and would have sailed from various bays and sea-lochs there. The lack of contemporary records, however, means that, apart from the leaders of this expedition, the majority of men or their origins cannot be identified.
The next wave of emigrants from Scotland arrived in Down and Antrim as a result of two Ayrshire lairds, James Hamilton and Hugh Montgomery, acquiring land there from Con O’Neill in 1606. Around the same time, Randall McDonnell, a descendant of the Highland redshanks, was granted much of northern Down. Despite being a Catholic, McDonnell encouraged Lowland Scots Protestants to settle there. The establishment of the Plantation of Ulster itself was a direct consequence of the Flight of the Earls, when the elite of the indigenous Irish abandoned their struggle with England and took refuge in the Catholic lands of Europe in 1607. King James then divided their lands and allocated them to English and Scottish landowners, known as “undertakers,” who undertook to settle the lands with British Protestants.
The Scottish landowners overwhelmingly came from the counties of Ayrshire, Lanarkshire, Renfrewshire, Kirkcudbrightshire and Dumfries-shire and would have recruited settlers for their Ulster estates from among their own territories in Scotland. For example, Hamilton and Montgomery would have brought people from Ayrshire and in all likelihood shipped them through the port of Ayr, while the MacClellands enlisted settlers from their lands in Galloway and are likely to have shipped them via Kirkcudbright to Londonderry.
Scottish migration to Ireland unfolded in distinct stages: firstly the Highlanders and Islanders in the late sixteenth century, then the Hamilton-Montgomery Lowlanders, followed by the Plantation period from 1610 to 1630, in the 1650s following the close of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, in the 1670s following the failure of the Covenanters Risings in Scotland, and finally in the 1690s resulting from successive poor harvests in Scotland. While the Highlanders arriving in the late sixteenth century were Catholic, the Lowland Scots arriving during the seventeenth century were mainly Protestant, Episcopalian at first and after 1641 overwhelmingly Presbyterian, apart from a few Catholics such as the Hamiltons, from Paisley, and their servants who settled in Strabane.
The migrants of the seventeenth century sailed from various ports in south west Scotland, and landed in Ulster ports from Strangford to Londonderry. The Scottish ports were Girvan, Ballantrae, Irvine, Port Glasgow, Ayr, Kirkcudbright, Dumfries, Glasgow, Port Patrick, Largs, and Greenock. These ports originally were engaged in trade or fishing, but as Scottish settlement in Ireland increased trade increased, and with more merchant ships bound for Ireland the opportunity to emigrate there increased. East Ulster ports had strong links with Largs, Ayr and Kirkcudbright; Ayr also had such with Belfast and Londonderry. The Scottish port books of the period, though far from comprehensive, do reveal trading routes and the commodities exported or imported, however little or no data survives which would identify passengers. Fortunately, burgh and church records (as well as certain family papers) do on occasion identify people bound for Ireland, and even refugees returning after the Irish Rebellion of 1641. The port books, the kirk session records, and certain family or estate papers can be consulted in the National Archives of Scotland. The port books of Londonderry, Coleraine, Carrickfergus and the Lecale ports for the years 1612-1615, have been transcribed and published, which provides insight to the trading links and therefore immigration routes at the time of the Plantation.
Editor’s Note:
Dr. Dobson has devoted years to the extraction of information pertaining to the Scots-Irish.
Some of those publications are:
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Scots-Irish Links, 1575-1725. In Two Parts [Part One & Part Two] The work identifies some 1,200 Scots who resided in Ulster between the early 1600s and the early 1700s. In a number of cases, David Dobson provides information on the person's spouse, children, local origins, landholding, and, of course, the source of the information.
