Ulster-Scots Biographies: The Ards and North Down

Introduction

There have been cultural, social and economic links between Scotland and Ulster since time immemorial. The distinguished historian G.M. Trevelyan has called the associations between the two regions ‘a constant factor in history’. The story of the Ulster-Scots in the Ards and North Down begins properly when two men from Ayrshire, James Hamilton and Hugh Montgomery, acquired a large portion of the Clandeboye O’Neill estates in north-east County Down.

Hamilton and Montgomery then advertised their new estates to their wider families and other Scots and in May 1606 the first boatloads of Scottish families arrived at Donaghadee, ready to start a new life. First dozens, then hundreds, then thousands poured in. In his acclaimed book, The Narrow Ground, A.T.Q. Stewart wrote, ‘They created the bridgehead through which the Scots were to come into Ulster for the rest of the century’.

Most of these settlers had well-known lowland Scottish surnames, which they brought to Ulster for the first time. From Anderson to Young, the first recorded examples of many Ulster-Scots surnames can be found in the early manuscripts and graveyards of the the Ards and North Down.

The early Scots in Ulster are not mysterious unknowable figures - there are plenty of good sources available which, when pulled together, paint vivid pictures of these people and their achievements. The more is uncovered about them, the more obvious it becomes that Ulster was not merely a Scottish colony - it was in many ways an extension of Scotland. The cultural ties established in the early 1600s are still evident today and nowhere more so than in the Ards and North Down.

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