During the Neolithic period, after the adoption of an agricultural way of life, massive stone monuments including passage tombs and court tombs were constructed over much of the northern part of Ireland and the west and north coasts of Scotland. Archaologist Barry Cunliffe observes that "The structural similarities and close geographical proximity of the Irish and Scottish monuments – seperated only by the narrow North Channel – is an indication that the two areas may well have been in regular contact with each other" (2001:171). Similar monuments are found on the western coasts of Wales and Cornwall, and the Atlantic coasts of Europe extending from Sweden to Portugal. Cunliffe has suggested that this shows the importance of the sea in binding together communities such as those in Ulster and Scotland at a time when travel by land was much more difficult.

During the Bronze Age the communal burial rites of the megalithic monuments started to give way to individual burials with grave goods including pottery, reflecting social changes spreading through the Atlantic coastal regions of Europe. Cunliffe observes that the new traditions "including the pottery styles, are shared between eastern and northern Ireland and southern Scotland, particularly the west coast, and clearly indicate a broad zone of contact and cultural interaction extending over a long period of time. Thus, in the third and second millenia (BC) Ireland seems to crystallise into two broad cultural groupings, one facing outwards to the Atlantic and retaining its old collective burial rites, the other facing inwards to the Irish Sea and western Scotland and sharing in the escalating social changes which were gripping Britain at the time (2001:242).

This pattern seems to continue into the Iron Age: Cunliffe notes that

The range and quality of elite metalwork available througout the first millenium BC and into the first millenium AD are sufficient to suggest that much of eastern, central, and northern Ireland was under the domination of an aristocratic warrior elite, and it is within this broad central and eastern zone that the great ritual sites, Tara, Navan, Rathcroghan, and Dun Ailinne, are to be found. The Atlantic-facing lands from Co. Donegal to Co. Kerry in the west and from Co. Cork to Co. Wexford in the south lie, for the most part, outside this zone of elite dominance and, apart from a few scattered exotic artefacts emanating from the elite zone, lack a distinctive material culture. Thus, although the artifactual evidence is disparate and contextually lacking, it does suggest that Ireland, in the later first millenium BC, divided into two distinctive socio-economic zones.

The epic tales of ‘the Ulster Cycle’, which were written down by Christian monks in the early medieval period, but probably passed down in the oral tradition for centuries beforehand, have been described by Jackson as "a window on the Iron Age". They portray a society in Ulster dominated by a warrior elite, in accordance with the archaeological evidence. They describe an Ireland divided into five Provinces: Ulster, Leinster, Munster, Connacht and Meath, some of the stories suggesting that the boundary of Ulster lay as far south as the Boyne during this period. They also record regular contacts with Alba, later to become Scotland. The warrior Cuchulain travelled there to be trained in the martial arts, and Deirdre of the Sorrows fled there to escape the wrath of the king of Ulster, her lover Naoise taking service with the king of the Picts.

Ian Adamson has demonstrated the presence in Ulster during the Iron Age of a people known as the Cruthin or Qretani (1974). These are Gaelic or Q-Celtic interpretations of the name Pretani or Prydein which referred to the same people in the P-Celtic or Brittonic language of the neighbouring island. The names Prydein and Pretani were later romanised as Britain and Britons, which was the name by which the Romans referred to those they had conquered. Those elements of the population in the area now known as Scotland, which they did not bring under their control, they referred to as Picts. The names Cruthin, Qretani, Pretani (and hence Briton)and Pict all translate into English as ‘People of the Pictures’ or ‘People of the Designs’, according with Roman accounts of the Britons as heavily painted or tattooed (Davies 1999).

During the 4th Century, Gaels from Ulster whom the Romans described as Scoti or Scots, a term meaning raiders or pirates, allied themselves with the Picts and with other tribes including Saxons from northern Europe to raid the Roman province of Brittania. In the course of this raiding, a romanised Briton named Patricius was seized from his home in northwestern Britannia and taken into slavery in Ulster. He escaped but later returned as an evangelist for Christianity basing himself in Armagh. Cunliffe notes that "If Patrick’s original home was in the north of Britain, possibly in the romanised region of Dumbarton (The Fort of the Britons), his choice of the north of Ireland would have been entirely logical in that he would have been following the long-established and no doubt still-operative trade route across the North Channel (2001:469).

In the 5th and 6th Centuries, raiding gave way to settlement: the Life of St. Columba tells of the landing of a small band of 150 men from Dal Riata in Antrim (Cunliffe 2001:459-60) who gave their name to the land they settled Ar Gael (Argyll) ‘The Coast of the Gaels’.

From this modest initial settlement grew the powerful kingdom of Dalriada, which held power on both sides of the sea. The settlement is well attested by placenames of Irish origin on the mainland and adjacent islands. Similar evidence also points to Irish settlement on the Galloway peninsula. That the settlers on the two sides of the North Channel should have been in close contact with each other in the 5th and 6th centuries need occasion no surprise. A community of common cultural ideas can be traced back to the Neolithic period when the region was closely linked by a common burial ritual, and throughout the Iron Age and Roman period the archaeological record shows that there was constant contact. The 150 settlers mentioned by St. Columba’s biographer were simply part of a continuing process of interaction.

Columba (also known as Columb or Colmcille: ‘The Dove of the Church’), was himself an example of the significance of continued ties between Ulster and the the land which was in the process of becoming Scotland. Originally from Donegal, Columba had founded the monastic settlement at Doire (Derry), where the Church of Ireland cathedral still bears his name.

In about 563 Columba sailed from northern Ireland with twelve followers to Dalriada in west Scotland, and two years later founded a monastery on the island of Iona…The establishment flourished and became highly influential, both as the focus of a group of Columbian monasteries spread throughout the north of Ireland and as the centre from which the Picts were converted (Cunliffe 2001:475).

The Scottish settlement of Dalriada existed alongside Pictland until"by a combination of aggression and intermarriage, the Scots merged with their Pictish neighbours, The traditional date of the final union is 843, when the whole of the Highlands and Islands came under the rule of Kenneth macAlpine. Throughout these four formative centuries the Scots retained a close relationship with their northern Irish forbears, and indeed much of their history as we know it comes from the Irish Annals…the importance of the sea in linking the communities was crucial (Cunliffe 2001:466).

Although the Scots were still a minority of the population, it was their language and culture that gradually came to dominate northern Britain, and from this time on, the kingdom of Scotland was a reality. It only encompassed the central part of the area we now call Scotland however. To the south were the Romano-British Kingdom of Strathclyde, centred on Dumbarton, the Viking Kingdom of Jorvik (York) and the Anglian kingdom of Northumbria, whilst Moray, Caithness and the northern and western isles came to be largely dominated by Vikings, who also maintained a fleet of longships on Lough Neagh, adding a Scandinavian element to the Ulster-Scottish heritage.

The maritime kingdom of Dalriada was replaced by the ‘Lordship of the Isles’ under the powerful Macdonald clan, who traced their descent to the Viking Somerled. The Macdonalds maintained a presence in Ulster, where they became known as MacDonnells, their stronghold being the spectacular castle at Dunluce, County Antrim, and the Lords of the Isles maintained their independence from the Kings of Scotland until the 13th century, holding their maritime realm together with Viking-style galleys, or Bir linn. The traditional wooden fishing boats of Ulster, known as Drontheims, are directly descended from the Viking longships, and a few are still sailed on the north coast.

In 1603, King James VI, now in control of all the territory we currently call Scotland, became King of England as well, following the death of the childless Queen Elizabeth. His first project was ‘The Breaking of the Border’: the subjugation of the turbulent border clans who had effectively ruled the frontier regions of England and Scotland, which James wanted to change from an almost permanent battleground between the two kingdoms into "the Middle Shires’ of a new ‘Great Britain’.

James then turned his attention to an equally turbulent part of his newly acquired domains – Ulster. He planned to settle Scottish Protestants there in order to subjugate the rebellious Catholic natives, and integrate the province into the new ‘British’ economic system. The task was initiated by private enterprise, the counties of Antrim and Down being effectively settled by Presbyterian Scots under the auspices of two Ayrshire lairds, and a similar project was initiated in County Monaghan. The ‘Flight of the Earls’ in 1607 made much greater areas of land available, and this led to a massive state-sponsored Plantation in the six remaining counties of Ulster. The effect of the various Plantations was that Antrim and Down became largely dominated by a Scots-speaking, Presbyterian immigrant population, whilst the whole of Ulster received a significant number of immigrants, mostly Scots, but including a smaller number of English, most of whom were borderers. Many of the Scots were also borderers: refugees or fugitives from James’ army, whilst others were from the western lowlands, with a smaller number from the extreme north-east, chiefly economic migrants fleeing recession and the collapse of rural communities brought about by the change from feudalism to a mercantilist economic system.

For James, the plantations seemed to kill three birds with one stone, pacifying the Gaelic natives of Ulster, making a region which had been reduced almost to desert by years of war economically productive, and removing a surplus population from Scotland, particularly rebellious borderers and ideologically dangerous Presbyterians. Of course, it did not work out exactly as planned.

FURTHER READING

Adamson, Ian. 1974. The Cruthin: The Ancient Kindred. Pretani: Belfast.

Adamson, Ian. 1991. The Ulster People: Ancient, Medieval and Modern. Pretani: Belfast.

Cunliffe, Barry. 2001. Facing the Ocean: The Atlantic and its Peoples. OUP: Oxford.

Davies, Norman. 1999. The Isles: A History. Macmillan: London.

Griffin, Patrick. 2000. The People with No Name: Ireland’s Ulster-Scots, America’s Scots-Irish and the Creation of a British Atlantic World. Princeton Univ.

Jackson, K.H. 1964. The Oldest Irish Tradition: A Window on the Iron Age. Cambridge.

Mallory, J.P. (ed) 1992. Aspects of the Táin. December Publications: Belfast.

Mallory, J.P. & T.E. McNeill. 1991. The Archaeology of Ulster: From Colonization to Plantation. Institute of Irish Studies, QUB: Belfast.

Mallory, J.P. & G. Stockman (eds) 1994. Ulidia: Proceedings of the First International Conference on the Ulster Cycle of Tales. December Publications: Belfast.

McCoy, Gordon & Maolcholaim Scott (eds) 2000. Aithne na Gael: Gaelic Identities. Institute of Irish Studies, QUB: Belfast.

Morris, John. 1995. The Age of Arthur: A History of the British Isles from 350 to 650. Phoenix: London.

Perceval-Maxwell, M. 1990(1973) The Scottish Migration to Ulster in the Reign of James I. Ulster Historical Foundation, Belfast.

Walker, Graham. 1995. Intimate Strangers: Political and Cultural Interaction Between Scotland and Ulster in Modern Times. John Donald: Edinburgh.