The Plantation

The Plantation of Ulster was a planned process of colonisation during the early 17th century. English and Scottish Protestants were settled on land that had been confiscated from Catholic Irish landowners in the six counties of Donegal, Coleraine (later abolished to become part of the new county of Londonderry), Fermanagh, Armagh and Cavan.

Until the late 16th century, Ulster was the most Gaelic part of Ireland, and the only province that was completely outside English control. However, the Nine Years War of 1594-1603 ended with the surrender of the O’Neill and O’Donnell lords to the English crown. In 1607, Hugh O’Neill and a group of rebel earls left Ireland (the “Flight of the Earls”) to seek Spanish help for a new rebellion. The Lord Deputy, Arthur Chichester, seized the opportunity to colonise the province and declared the lands of O’Neill, O’Donnell and their followers forfeit.

All land was confiscated, and then redistributed to create concentrations of British settlers around new towns and garrisons. The City of London guilds were also granted land on the west bank of the River Foyle to build their own city (Londonderry), and lands in the county.

By the 1630s there were 20,000 adult male British settlers in Ulster, and perhaps 80,000 settlers in all. However, it was not easy to attract tenants from Britain, and many landowners had to keep Irish tenants, contrary to the original plan, which was for segregation between settlers and natives.

The 1640s saw Irish rebellion against the planters, 12 years of war, and ultimately the re-conquest of the province by the English parliamentary New Model Army. The wars eliminated the last major Catholic landowners in Ulster.

The Plantation period is a very important one for researchers of woodland history, since its beginning coincides with the threshold date for classifying ancient woodland. The amount of change in land ownership at this time led to a great deal of map-making and survey, so that new landowners would know what they were getting, and these maps and records are invaluable in tracing the history of Northern Ireland’s woods. The Plantation and the centuries that followed also had a significant impact on woodland cover as areas were felled and exploited, and other areas were planted to landscape new estates.