Urbanisation in North-West Ulster, 1609–1670

Abstract

A central problem confronting most Irish urban historians is the extent to which the evolution of the urban network has been influenced by Tudor and Stuart plantations. The official plantation of Ulster by James I from 1609 to 1625 was not responsible for the first introduction of towns, even to west Ulster, but because of the survival of adequate source data it is not possible to observe some of the most important processes of urbanisation in operation until this period. In north-west Ulster these processes include the emergence of an urban hierarchy where town size was related to function and to the density of the adjacent rural population, and the development of an urban network whose spatial relationships were closely governed by the pattern of dispersed rural settlement. Although these developments were associated with plantation settlement, this does not necessarily imply that they were brought about intentionally by the official plantation scheme.