| 6. The early Eighteenth Century |
| Migration to Ulster, mainly from Scotland,
continued into the early eighteenth
century. This was impacting in areas
where British settlement had hitherto been
fairly limited. In 1714 Hugh McMahon, Catholic
bishop of the diocese of Clogher, wrote that
‘from the neighbouring country of Scotland
Calvinists are coming over here daily in large
groups of families, occupying the towns and
villages, seizing the farms in the richer parts
of the country and expelling the natives’.
Within the diocese over which McMahon was
bishop there were considerable changes
brought about by the influx of British settlers.
County Monaghan witnessed huge increase in
the number of British inhabitants in the
seventy years after 1660. The so-called census
of 1659 recorded
only 434 British
households in Co.
Monaghan. By
1733 there was a
British presence in
every parish and
in some there were
fairly sizeable
Protestant
communities.
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Changes in settlement patterns were also
discernable in parts of south County Armagh.
In 1733 a number of landowners in the parish
of Creggan invited Presbyterians to settle on
their estates and as an encouragement
promised to provide an income for a
Presbyterian minister. As a result a significant
number of families of Scottish background
moved to the Tullyvallen area. In 1746 one of
the local landowners, Alexander Hamilton took
out a patent for a Saturday market at
Newtownhamilton and two annual fairs. The
area around Newtownhamilton later became
parish in its own right, taking the name of the
market town. Eighteenth-century commentators, such as the
Rev. William Henry, rector of Killesher parish in
County Fermanagh, were able to differentiate
between areas on the basis of the
characteristics of the local inhabitants. For
example, in Donegal, Henry distinguished
between people of English and of Scottish
descent by the way they lived and worked: ‘The
English planters are easily known by the
neatness of their houses and pleasant
plantations of trees.
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The Scots, on the other
hand, neglected this, but made up for it
through their efforts to improve the soil. Others
noted the difference in speech of those of
Scottish descent. When travelling through
County Fermanagh in the 1740s Isaac Butler
noted that in the area to the north of
Enniskillen towards Lisnarrick the people all
had the ‘Scotch accent’. Journeying through
east County Antrim c.1760 Lord Edward Willes
commented that ‘all the people of this part of
the world speaks the broad lowland Scotch
and have all the Scotch phrases. It will be a
dispute between the two kingdoms until the
end of time whether Ireland was peopled from
Scotland or Scotland from Ireland’. In the latter
part of the eighteenth century the Hibernian
Magazine, in a description of the new market
house in Newtownards, County Down, noted:
‘The language spoken here is broad Scotch
hardly to be understood by strangers’.
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