The idea of the Plantation of Ulster was to bring people together from different parts of what was then becoming quite a trendy term - ‘Britain’. That is, that Englishmen and Scottishmen were to be planted together and, in the words of Sir John Davies, that they would grow up together like trees in an orchard and they would form this new society. And, in a sense, Ulster was meant to be a model of what could be created between England and Scotland with the new King, James VI of Scotland / James I of England.

Now many of those who actually get the land in Ulster, of course, are far from ideal candidates for this: many of them are perceived as ‘free-booters’; many of them are perceived as the King’s favourites who got land with, you know, not having the right sort of backgrounds at all to be landlords and so tensions grow up between the English and the Scots.

Even at very simple levels, you know, the English do not understand the Scots: they cannot understand the language they speak; they cannot read the way in which they write (there has to be an extra clerk appointed to read Scottish script) so that there are all sorts of tensions growing up between them. And in one case, one rather interesting case, an English landlord takes a pot-shot at a Scottish landlord in the Barony of Strabane.

Now that’s the only example we have of tensions going that far, but it’s clear that relationships were far, far from easy and that some of the relationships between the English and the Scots were at least as fraught as the relationships between the Irish and the English - remembering of course that many of the Scots who came were Highland Scots, with Gaelic as their language, with many of their manners and customs, of course, being rather like those of the native Irish. And also many others of the Scots who came were worse than that - they were Catholic - so that the Scottish settlement in the Barony of Strabane, (one of the most important areas of settlement) was almost entirely Scottish Catholic who were fleeing Scotland so tensions were, shall we say, pronounced at times.