Rigid fortifications were required by the Government so that, in that sense, you can say that they are a reflection of the attitudes of those who were coming in. A significant number of the planters, particularly those who were servitors, were themselves of military background. Many of them held military positions simultaneous with being planters, so that unquestionably from the servitor point of view, the necessity of maintaining a strong military presence, that that was part of their being - after all they had been soldiers all of their life, soldiers who had now become landed proprietors. They believed that the opportunity to acquire these lands was in the aftermath of war and that they had to be held by force.

The undertakers might not necessarily have shared that particular point of view. And neither... we are not quite certain, what the political and social attitudes of those who came in as tenants, and indeed as artisans (because there was a significant artisan population as well), that these people who wanted - of necessity, they had to establish good working relations with their Catholic neighbours. If you came in as a carpenter or a tanner, quite clEarly you had to engage in day-to-day interactions with the Catholic population who still were the most numerous population on the ground in the buying and selling of commodities.

And there is some evidence that a significant number of the incoming population learned the Irish language, or at least learned sufficient Irish language to facilitate commercial interactions with the native population. Perhaps some of them abandoned their Protestantism, in the same way as some of the Catholic population on the Irish side abandoned their Catholicism in that sense. And there does appear to have been some degree of inter-marriage between the two populations, probably relatively low, but nonetheless some interaction was occurring at that level; which we don’t fully understand because we don’t have the kind of sources that provide insight into the mentalities of those at any level other than at the highest level.