Did you know?

Some facts about Ulster-Scots language & literature:

  • Ulster Scots has its own literature, including the works of the eighteenth and nineteenth Century ‘rhyming weaver’ poets such as Hugh Porter, the Bard of Moneyslane; James Orr, the Bard of Ballycarry; Samuel Thomson, the Bard of Carngranny; and David Herbison, the Bard of Dunclug.

  • Samuel Thomson, the Bard of Carngranny, dedicated a volume of his poetry in 1793 to ‘Mr Robert Burns, the Ayrshire poet’, and in 1794 travelled to Dumfries to meet and exchange poems with Burns.

  • In 1787 James Magee of Bridge Street, Belfast, published the first edition of Burns’s poetry outside Scotland.

  • Thanks to Andrew Gibson, a businessman who was a native of Ayrshire, The Linen Hall Library in Belfast has in the Gibson Collection one of the finest collections of Burns material in the world.

  • Archibald McIlroy, perhaps the foremost local exponent of the Kailyard school of writing, died as a result of the sinking of the RMS Lusitania by a German submarine off the Old Head of Kinsale on 7 May 1915.

  • The most successful and famous Kailyard novel is probably W. G. Lyttle’s Betsy Gray or, Hearts of Down: A Tale of Ninety-Eight. Although a work of fiction, the book contains real historical figures and describes real events to such an extent that it is difficult to disentangle fact and fiction.

  • In 1786 the Belfast News Letter was the first newspaper outside Scotland to publish extracts of Burns’s poetry.

  • Burns’s poetry was published with a glossary. In Ulster, volumes of Burns are found with the poems well thumbed but the glossary in almost pristine condition.

  • Robert Lloyd Praeger was a famous Ulster-Scot - he found weeds so interesting and fascinating that he published a book about them in 1913!

  • A Blue Plaque in the honour of Robert Lloyd Praeger and his sister was unveiled in Holywood, Co Down by the Ulster History Society Circle.

  • In the Special Collections section at the main Library of Queen's University, Belfast, the Thomas Andrews Manuscript Collection of about 85 items was donated to the University by the "Andrew's" family in 1935.

  • Ulster-Scots has its own literature, including the works of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ‘rhyming weaver’ poets such as Hugh Porter, the Bard of Moneyslane; James Orr, the Bard of Ballycarry; Samuel Thomson, the Bard of Carngranny; and David Herbison, the Bard of Dunclug.

  • Three women poets merit the ‘weaver poet’ description. The early nineteenth-century poet Sarah Leech of Raphoe in east Donegal was by far the most talented.

  • Ulster-Scots literature also finds expression in the ‘Kailyard’ novel. The term is derived from the Scots ‘kailyaird’ or ‘kailyard’ which means the small cabbage patch (usually adjacent to a cottage).