OK, so hopefully you have already read about the Vikings fighting it out at War Hollow, and about the Normans arriving in Ireland (the de Clare’s, Strongbow cider, Chris de Burgh, & de Courcey’s) and marching up to Dunluce. So, now we come to the 1600s.
From England point of view, Ireland (and Scotland) are in a mess.
The peasants are revolting. The natives are restless. The Normans / English in Ireland have gone native and are restless. The Scots are revolting. etc.
The 1600s start with Gunpowder Treason and Plot to overthrow the English government. And it goes downhill from there.
There are wrecks of the Spanish Armada and gold bullion washing up on Dunluce shore; there is the Plantation of Ulster and more foreigners coming in; Bushmills whisky; armies and invasions, and the destruction of ancient abbey and castles; civil war, beheading of the king; cancellation of Christmas; there is bubonic plague, and great fires in the capital city; the Orange revolution, sieges, and a right royal bonking; and Dunluce is abandoned and Portrush is improverished.
A Century of Trouble.
Dunluce castle – the MacDonnells stronghold – sea caves, spanish shipwrecks, treasure, cannons, intrigue, ….. (photo by the author)
The 1500s ended on a high for Portrush. Sorley Boy MacDonnell gathers up the treasure from the wreck of the Spanish Girona, and fortifies his Dunluce stronghold with its cannons. He is Lord of the Isles and of the Ulster Route, and Portrush is the main port for him and his Scottish clan, its landing place defended by Castle-an-Teenie, the castle of the fire, and by Ballyreagh castle. A cosmopolitan township develops around Dunluce castle. Spiritually there is the big abbey at the Northern Counties site, since 1100s. Portrush is prospering, on a roll.
Left/ the Galleas Girona. (Wikipedia) 2/ “A Spanish Armada treasure chest, considered to be early salvage from the wreck of the Girona” 3/ treasures of the Girona: cross of a knight of Saint John of Jerusalem
Right/ Prosperous townshop around Dunluce, but razed to the ground by Munro; rediscovered and being re-excavated these days. (image from Project-of-Plantation booklet)
Ireland in the late 1500s…… the English king is trying to keep in control but Ireland is a catholic mix of Irish Earls, of Scottish Lords of the Isles in Ulster, and of the ‘Old English’ (Normans) gone native, ‘more Irish than the Irish’. Increasing prosperity in Ireland, and in Scotland too, raises ambitions, keen to be free of English interference…. But England intends to stay on top and is alarmed by Dunluce’s new fortifications and cannons. Elizabethans arrive and get land, and even plan to make Portrush an island garrison, to keep the Scots at Dunluce in check.
MacDonnell has already been inviting his scottish buddies to come and work in his estates around Ulster, in a ‘private plantation’. But Ireland is restive and James takes it to a new level and he starts the Ulster plantation in 1609, inviting Scots and English protestants to supplant and replace the belligerent locals and to assert his authority. London Irish Societies form to finance the venture. Coleraine is a big plantation centre and trading port – but shifting sandbanks at the bar mouth are treacherous and ships berth off Portrush instead – another nice boost to summer visitor numbers and trade.
Left/ Sorley Boy MacDonnell, 1505-1590 (wikipedia)
Centre/ grandson, Randal, born 1609, 1st Marquess of Antrim, 1636 – 1683
Right/ Katherine Villiers , widow of royal favoroite George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham. What a catch! known as the richest woman in Britain outside of the royal family. Dunluce kitchen collapsed under her cooking, in 1639, and later she disappeared down south.
The developing plantations usurp the Irish Earls and they take Flight from Lough Swilly – they abandon their heritage and kin and disappear from the scene.
The MacDonnells are under suspicion but manage to cling on to Ulster.
Coleraine, with Derry, big plantation towns; with the town layout now still following the plantation times.
Sir Thomas Philips was the big guy, developing the plantation, leasing land at Portrush, planning to slice off Portrush headland, licensing whisky, ….. (Project-of-Plantation-booklet.pdf)
Scotland has broken away in its calvinist Reformation, and in 1638 is signing Carson’s Solemn League and Covenant to protect its new faith. England’s Charles schemes with Ireland to invade Scotland and to pull them back to the catholic faith; MacDonnell prepares the Irish new model army…..
England, Scotland and Ireland are ganging up, all are getting their armies ready. It is 1639 and the brink of war. It is 1939 all over again.
England strikes against itself first and the country descends into civil war: parliament vs Charles, protestant vs catholic.
And as the saying goes, “England’s difficulty is Ireland’s opportunity” – the Irish rise in 1641 and take their vengeance on the plantationists and the English crown.
Charles is playing golf at Leith near Edinburgh in 1642 when he hears of the Irish uprising. He asks the Scots to help – and their covenanter army lands at Portrush, seriously well-armed with cannons, to protect the protestant plantationists. The Scots are top-notch, honed in european wars. They intend that Ireland must not be able to threaten Scotland again. It is scorched earth policy: General Munro destroys Portrush- and Ballyreagh castles; the ancient abbey is dissolved; Dunluce Castle is besieged and ransacked; MacDonnell is captured; it’s township is razed to the ground. Irish rebels take refuge in Ballywillan old church but are forced at cannon-point to sign the oath of allegiance to the crown.
Munro marches on to lift the siege of Coleraine plantation and on to infamous Portadown. In Ulster, the rebellion is over. Dunluce and Portrush are reduced, subdued, diminished.
Later Cromwell joins in at Drogheda and massacres fully embed the grievances against England.
Two generations, fifty years later… 1689, James II lands with French troops at Kinsale for his push to recover his kingdom from William. They ride up to the siege at Derry. He overnights at Ballymoney; he bonks the landlord’s daughter; the resulting royal offspring Dorothea is buried in Ballywillan old church.
MacDonnell’s last gasp Catholic rebellion, he joins with James but defeat at Boyne. All is lost: he is fully tainted, and fully impoverished: Dunluce castle is abandoned.
The lesser MacDonnells at Glenarm Castle will in future be Lord Antrim.
In London there was also Guy Fawkes, and the Black Death, and the Great Fire too. In Ireland it is the end of the power of the Earls, of the old English. It is the end of the three castles and abbey around Portrush; the town is reduced to a shanty fishing hamlet around the harbour.
The fairy-tale, the romantic era of castles and Dunluce and Sorley Boy, is over.
There are the 1715 and the ’49 Stuart uprisings in Scotland but Ireland is broken and has no energy to join in. The authority of the Scottish chiefs will be broken too and the clans expelled in the Highland Clearances to make way for sheep. Later, famine in Ireland; Scots and Irish grievances are spread around the world.
—————
Now, in this final section I think about the part that my family played in all this. You know, like Spike Milligan’s book, “Adolf Hitler – My Part In His Downfall.”
There is my great-grandmother on the right, Martha Brown, in the turnip field around Glasgow. This photo, about 1905, is of course several hundred of years later than this 1600s story, but the principles are the same.
The Brown family – a good Scots name – is living in Ireland, in the Mournes. One of 7 children squashed in a small basic cottage, in her mid-teens, in the mid-1890s Martha runs off to Scotland, to Glasgow. She soon gets married to a MacDonald and then lives in Glasgow tenements, then Ayrshire pit villages and then the coal mining area in Lothian. Migratory, foot-loose, transitory, the work ethic: “You followed the work.”
1918, her older daughter Annie in Glasgow has served in the WAAF in WWI. They take a trip back to see the Brown family in the Mournes – and Annie meets Thomas Martin, my grandad. They marry, and they live on the Martin family farm in the Mournes, near Tollymore.
Ancestry: the pull of kith and kin is strong! Pregnant, she wants her first child to be born in Scotland and like Mary & Joseph she travels back to her Mum in Lothian.
Transitory: my uncle Tom on the farm dreams of emigrating to Canada but is constrained by being the last farming Martin on the family farm.
Migratory: 1920s, a great uncle migrates from the Mournes farm to Argentina and works on the railways to open up the country. I have the walking stick from him, “WM”, that signifies, William Martin, I have arrived safely and things are going fine.
So, a Tale of Brown’s & Martin’s – both common Scots names. Genealogy records are hard to trace further back than the mid-1800s but I assume that they went to Ireland as part of the Plantation of Ulster in the 1600s. With family roots in Scotland and Ireland, there is free flow of intercourse between, and that element of wander-lust – settled but not quite settled, ancestral and family roots elsewhere – migratory and on the move to follow the work.
1690 & the Boyne, and the end of James and the Stuarts. The expectation for the Scots-Irish, mostly presbyterian, that they would now be left in freedom to worship. But, they are now the majority in Ulster and find that they are under suspicion – there are laws against them restricting their freedoms and their rights, and their rents are whacked up.
Scots-Irish presbyterians: settled in Ireland but not quite settled, transitory, migratory, family roots elsewhere. Feeling of not fully welcome here, and the next generation thinks to move on, in the great migrations of the 1700s. The famines in the 1800s bring another wave of Irish, to the New World, to the frontier, to fight in the Alamo, to clear the Vancouver forests, to write the US constitution, to build the US and Canada and S.America
It is risk, and not all are successful. In Argentina, a Buenos Aires researcher finds me the records of the funeral of my great-uncle, William Martin, died in a railway accident after a few years there.
And many Scots-Irish migrate to the US – you see the bright green ‘hot-spot’ of ‘my DNA in the south-east of USA, in the Appalachian mountains of Kentucky. They followed the work onwards to the big steel industries in Ohio, to find that those jobs disappear off to Kawasaki and Korea and Japan and China. It is a bit of a shock to read in ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ by J.D. Vance, that my kith and kin are now the rednecks that voted Trump to Make America Great, and maybe stormed the White House in their frustration.
Portrush Tales 
This is both entertaining and educational – thanks
LikeLike
Thank you Harry for the nice feedback, appreciated 🙂
LikeLike