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Dromore Parish Located in the Southwest of Tyrone County, Ulster
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Dromore Parish Located in the Southwest of Tyrone County, Ulster
Dromore Parish Located in the Southwest of Tyrone County, Ulster
nations, who for debt, or breaking and fleeing from justice, or seeking shelter, came hither; hoping
to be without fear of man’s justice in a land where there was nothing, or but little, fear of God. And
in a few years there flocked such a multitude of people from Scotland, that these northern
counties…were in a good measure planted. Yet most of the people, as I said before, made up of a
body (and it is strange) of different names, nations, dialects, temper, breeding; and in a word, all
void of godliness, who seemed rather to flee from God in this enterprise than to follow their own
mercy…65
New colonists acted as a garrison to insure loyalty to the Crown of unconquered Gaelic province. Rev George Hill, the great historian of the Ulster Plantation, summed up the results of this exercise:
But the paradise of plenty, if not of peace, to which these strangers at times attained, was only
secured by a very heavy and dreadful sacrifice of the general interest of Ireland as a nation. For to
this
settlement in Ulster…may be traced the awful scenes and events
of the ten years’ civil war
commencing in 1641, the horrors of
the revolutionary struggle in 1690, and the reawakening of
these horrors in 1798---not to mention certain less notable phases of the struggle during the intervals
between those disastrous eras. The dragons’ teeth, so plentifully, and as if so deliberately sown in
this Ulster plantation, have indeed, sprung up at times with more than usually abundant growth,
yielding their ghastly harvests of blood and death on almost every plain, and by almost every river
side, and in almost every glen of our northern province.66
Omagh baron was granted to five members of the Tuchet family. The parish of Dromore was divided up into three plantation estates. Although they were granted an alleged 11,000 acres, but in fact it was twenty times larger, amounting to 224,674 acres.67 No wonder this plantation has been dubbed “The Great Fraud of Ulster”.68 Colonists did not settle Dromore parish till later, thus, preserving the Irish character.
The largest estate was created by royal grant “The Manor of Stowey”. It encompassed the parishes of Kilskeery and Dromore. This estate took its name, Brad, from the old territory of the Braghaid, the gorge of the Kilskeery river. It contained an alleged 2,000 acres, but was really several times that size.69
This estate was granted on March 12, 1610-11, to Sir Marvyn Tuchet, eldest son of Lord Audley, who had become Lord Castlehaven, but died at Drumquin, in 1616.70 Then Sir Marvyn succeeded his father in both titles, but was executed in London in 1631.71 The latter evidently never saw this estate. Royal surveys of 1611, 1619 and 1622 into the progress of the plantation in Ulster reported that nothing had been built on this property.72
65 Rev. Andrew Stewart, Presbyterian minister, Donahadee (1645-71), quoted by Rev. George Hill in his Plantation in Ulster (Belfast 1877), p. 447. J. Braidwood in his “Ulster and Elizabethan English”, in Ulster Dialects (1964), remarks on the small tenant class of colonists: “Going to Ireland was looked upon as the miserable mark of a deplorable person, yea, it was turned to a proverb, and one of the worst expressions of disdain…(was) to tell a man that Ireland would be his hinder end”.
66 Hill, op. Cit., 590
67 Ibid., 268, note 43
68 This was the title of a work by T. M. Healy, M.P., published in Dublin, 1917.
69 Hill, 269
70 Ibid., Earl of Belmore, The Irish Historical Atlas (1903), p.57
71 Hill, 269, note 47
72 Belmore, op. cit., 57; UJA (1964), 143.