May 1606
The first boats sailed from Portpatrick in May and arrived at Donaghadee. These were not the warrior emigrants which Queen Elizabeth I had sent during the 1500s to tame a hostile land. These settlers were an entire cross-section of Lowland Scottish society from large landholders to small tenant farmers, with their families in tow. They were attracted to Ulster by James Hamilton and Hugh Montgomery’s offer of low rents for relatively large areas of available land. They were ready to create a new society.

They were wise to begin the Settlement in May; even today the North Channel can be a difficult crossing during the winter months. This also gave them a full summer to prepare for their first winter, always the most difficult time of year in a new land, never mind a land which was as devastated as east Ulster was.

Where did they come from?
Hamilton and Montgomery brought their own extended families from Ayrshire, and in Montgomery’s case some of the family’s existing tenants on the Montgomery estates in Scotland were tempted across the water to begin a new life in Ulster. Word spread like wildfire and soon the entire west of Scotland was aware of the new opportunity, right up into the Mull of Kintyre and eventually across the Lowlands into what was still then Border Reiver territory. In his book “Albion’s Seed”, Professor David Hackett Fischer includes a map which shows where the earliest settlers came from – the map on this page shows these locations (reproduced below with Professor Fischer’s personal permission).

The sea crossing was not as much of a challenge as we might think. Travel today to where many of the settlers came from - the Ayrshire coast near Ardrossan and Largs - and look across to Arran, Bute and Kintyre. If you travel along the coastal road from Stranraer towards Dumfries you’ll see it again – narrow stretches of water with outcrops of land, peninsulas and large islands just a boat trip away. These people were familiar with short sea crossings, it was part of their culture. (In fact, the crossing from Portpatrick to Donaghadee is shorter than the crossing from Ayr to Campbeltown on the Mull of Kinytre.)

What did the settlers find when they arrived?
The first sight of east Ulster must have been a shocking experience for the settlers. This was not a landscape of well-tilled agricultural land, it was a wasted and devastated former war zone.

The Montgomery Manuscripts famously record that “...in the spring time, Anno. 1606, those parishes were now more wasted than America... 30 cabins could not be found, nor any stone walls, but ruined roofless churches, and a few vaults at Gray Abbey, and a stump of an old castle in Newton, in each of which some Gentlemen sheltered themselves at their first coming over…”.  Sir Brian O’Neill’s scorched earth policy of 1572 had been highly effective.

So the settlers started work, repairing the few ruined stone buildings which remained and preparing the lands for farming. Montgomery had “a low stone walled house” built near the harbour at Donaghadee and sent both the building materials and workers over from Scotland. This house is believed to be the original building on the site of The Manor House in Donaghadee today.

Next he repaired the stump of the old Castle in Newtown (Newtownards) - Castle Gardens Primary School and the new CastleBawn retail development in Newtownards are both references to Hugh Montgomery’s repaired castle. Next were the adjacent Newtownards Priory ruins, for which he imported timber from Norway and slates from Scotland. He doubled the Priory in size and added the bell tower. He built a “great school” in Newtown to teach Latin, Greek and Logicks, including a green where the students could play golf, football and archery.

Montgomery acquired lands at Grey Abbey in 1607, “wholly repaired” the Abbey and installed Rev David McGill of Edinburgh as Curate there. Grey Abbey and Newtownards Priory survive to this day and are maintained by the Environment & Heritage Service.

Where did the Settlers live?
The initial settlements were Donaghadee, Newtownards and Bangor, and later included Greyabbey, Comber and Killyleagh. Con O’Neill’s lands had been divided among O’Neill, Hamilton and Montgomery on the basis of townlands, with the main tenants granted up to 1000 acres each. The smaller tenants who came across were granted portions of these lands, usually in amounts of between two and four acres each, at a price of 1 shilling per acre each year. The map shown here shows the distribution of the initial 1606 Hamilton & Montgomery lands.

The main landholders built stone houses for themselves, whilst the smaller tenants built cottages from sods and saplings, with rushes for thatch and bushes for wattle. Wood was cut from the forests in the Lagan Valley and was transported to the new settlement to help in the building of houses and farms.

Meanwhile, back in Scotland... The Fight of the Earls!
Back in Scotland, the Montgomery/Cunningham struggle for precedency in Scotland (which had begun in 1488) once again flared up. On 1st July 1606 the heads of the families - the two Earls themselves - had a “violent tumult” close to the Scottish Parliament and Privy Council in Perth. The Montgomery Manuscripts tell us that
“...the fight lasted from seven until ten o'clock at night... and it was not until the year 1609 that a reconciliation could be effected...”

Yet events back home don’t seem to have disturbed Hugh Montgomery’s planning and he forged ahead with the new Ulster settlement. His brother, the newly appointed Bishop of Derry, Raphoe and Clogher - George Montgomery - arrived in west Ulster in Autumn 1606, and copied what Hugh was doing in the east. He advertised his newly acquired church lands to Scots living in Glasgow, Ayr, Irvine and Greenock, and the first Scottish settlers began to arrive in Donegal and the North West in the spring of 1607. Around the same time other Scots started to arrive in Derry and Lifford.

Behind every good man...
Hugh Montgomery’s wife, Elizabeth, organised most of the progress on the Montgomery estates in east Ulster. She had watermills built and established textile manufacturing of linen, woollen and tartan cloth. She offered new settlers a house, a garden plot and fodder for the winter in return for their labour. The fallow land was planted and the result was two consecutive bumper crops, giving the Settlement the prosperity it needed to survive and the appeal to attract more and more Scots across the North Channel.

A market was established in Newtown, with Scottish merchants coming across the North Channel to sell their goods to the Ulster-Scots. Records say that many of these traders were able to travel to the market in Newtown and be back in Scotland for bedtime. Sir Thomas Craig, still regarded as one of the finest legal minds Scotland has ever produced, wrote in 1606 “every day I see a stream of emigrants passing over to Ulster from my homeland”.

May 1607 - Jamestown,Virginia
King James I may well have been inspired by the immediate success of the Hamilton & Montgomery Settlement. On December 20th 1606 three ships – the Godspeed, the Discovery and the Susan Constant – left London with the King’s blessing, bound for Virginia. They arrived with 104 male settlers and established the first permanent English settlement in the New World on May 13th 1607 - exactly one year after the Scots arrived in Ulster. They founded the settlement of Jamestown, in honour of the King.

September 1607 - The Flight of the Earls
Back in west Ulster, Bishop George Montgomery was becoming embroiled in a series of disputes - as the only Scottish bishop in Ireland he has been described as having a “zeal” compared to the “sluggishness” of the other bishops. George Montgomery claimed far more land than the church could prove that it owned, including about half of the Earl of Tyrone’s estate. This dispute was one of the factors which would result in the Flight of the Earls from Rathmullan in September 1607.

Arise, Sir James Hamilton
Hugh Montgomery had already been knighted by the King sometime between April and November of 1605 (ie around the time of King James approving the three-way division, and appointing George Montgomery as Bishop). Delighted by the achievements in east Ulster, King James I knighted Hamilton in 1608, but the year was also one of sorrow - his father, Rev Hans Hamilton, died at Dunlop, Ayrshire on 30th May.

September 1610 - The Plantation of (the west of) Ulster commences
Sir Arthur Chichester - no doubt still angered by losing out on Con O’Neill’s lands in east Ulster, and greatly irritated by the rapid success of the Hamilton & Montgomery Settlement - saw the Flight of the Earls as another opportunity. On 17th September 1607, just 13 days after the Earls had left, Chichester brought forward two plans as to how their forfeited lands could be developed. These proposed schemes would eventually become the Plantation of Ulster (covering the counties of Armagh, Fermanagh, Cavan, Donegal, Tyrone and Londonderry) which would begin in September 1610.

Hamilton was concerned with the plans for the Plantation. He travelled to England in October 1609 and May 1610 - as a result he purchased some of the lands in County Cavan which had been set aside for Scottish planters.

1611 – The Plantation Commissioners Report
With the Plantation of Ulster underway, the Plantation Commissioners visited the Hamilton & Montgomery Settlement in 1611. Montgomery’s Newtownards was described as “...a good town of a hundred houses or there abouts all peopled by Scots...”

They wrote that “...Sir James Hamylton, Knight, hath buylded a fayre stone house at the towne of Bangor... about 60 foote longe and 22 foote broade; the town consists of 80 newe houses, all inhabited with Scotyshemen and Englishmen...”. The site of this house is now Bangor Town Hall and North Down Heritage Centre. Part of the permanent exhibition is the original 1625 Hamilton estate “Raven Maps”, drawn by Thomas Raven.

1613 - The First Royal Borough, The First Presbyterian Minister
By 1613 it was clear that the Settlement had been a transformation. Inside only seven years, from what had been wasted and depopulated land, Newtown was made a Royal Borough, with Sir Hugh Montgomery nominated as Newtown’s first Provost, and the right to send two members to Parliament.

Yet the progress of the Settlement was not just physical, economic and political. One of Hugh Montgomery’s major tenants was Sir William Edmonston, Laird of Duntreath in Scotland. (His father, Sir James Edmonston, had narrowly escaped execution for his involvement in a plot to kill the young King James). Sir William moved from his Donaghadee lands to Ballycarry in County Antrim, and brought the 44 year old Rev Edward Brice across from Stirlingshire. Brice was the first Presbyterian minister in Ulster, arriving in 1613.

And so begins the next great chapter in Ulster-Scots history - the arrival of the Presbyterian ministers - all rooted in the Hamilton & Montgomery Settlement of 1606, “The Dawn of the Ulster-Scots.”

(This article was originally published in The Ulster-Scot, May 2006)