Landowners received lands in the Plantation of Ulster. Most were minor lairds, though others, such as Ludovic Stewart, Duke of Lennox and James Hamilton, Earl of Abercorn, were aristocrats and held important positions in the Scottish government. Many of the original grantees sold out early on. Some never even made it as far as Ireland. Others took their responsibilities seriously and built fortifications and introduced the required number of settlers to their estates. Brief outlines of the activities of two undertakers are given below.

Sir George Hamilton of Greenlaw was a younger son of Lord Claud Hamilton of Paisley, near Glasgow. In 1610 he and two of his older brothers, the Earl of Abercorn, and Sir Claud Hamilton of Shawfield, received grants of land in Strabane barony in north-west County Tyrone. Right from the start Sir George proved to be an energetic planter. He differed from most of the settlers who came to Ulster from Scotland in the early 17th century in that he was a Roman Catholic.

Sir Robert McClelland of Bombie was born about 1592 in Kirkcudbright in south-west Scotland. He was still a teenager when he was appointed the chief undertaker in the barony of Boylagh and Banagh in the west of County Donegal. These lands were mainly mountainous and Sir Robert showed little interest in developing them, selling out in 1616. He did not abandon his interest in Ulster, however, for within a couple of years he was leasing two estates in County Londonderry  and had introduced over 200 settlers to these lands.

The government wanted the settlers to live together in villages on each estate and not scattered here and there. It was thought that the settlers would be safer if they lived close to each other. However, in reality most of the settlers did not live like this. Most of the farmers preferred to live on their farms rather than in a village. They did not want to have to spend time each day walking several miles from a village to their farms, perhaps having to cross a river or boggy land.

In the early seventeenth century thousands of Scots moved to Ulster. Many of these men came as part of the Plantation of Ulster, an official settlement affecting six counties – Armagh, Cavan, Donegal, Fermanagh, Londonderry and Tyrone. Others moved to Ulster as part of the privately sponsored settlements of Sir Hugh Montgomery and Sir James Hamilton in north-east County Down or to north Antrim under Sir Randal McDonnell (later Earl of Antrim). Though Sir Randal was a Catholic Scot from the Highlands, he encouraged Lowland Protestant Scots to become farmers on his vast 333,000 acre estate.

In the early seventeenth century a number of ministers with Presbyterian convictions moved to Ulster from Scotland and were particularly active in counties Antrim and Down. In 1642 at Carrickfergus the first Irish presbytery was established and in the following decades the Presbyterian Church in Ireland began to emerge as a denomination, distinct from the Church of Ireland. This map shows the location of Presbyterian ministers in Ulster around 1660. In 1661 each of these men was expelled from his church for refusing to accept the episcopalian government of the Church of Ireland.