Did you know?

Some facts about Ulster-Scots places:

• Geographically, 12 or 13 miles of water separate the coasts of Ulster and Scotland. Since travel by water was easier than land travel for the greater part of human history, it is scarcely surprising that Ulster has been more closely linked with Scotland than the rest of the island of Ireland.

• Travelling around Ireland in 1796-7, just after Burns’s early death, the French Royalist émigré, the Chevalier de Latocnaye, concluded that ‘Belfast has almost entirely the look of a Scotch town, and the character of its inhabitants has considerable resemblance to that of the people of Glasgow’. Writing about County Antrim, de Latocnaye thought ‘the way of speaking, and even of dressing, is much more Scotch than Irish’.

• The late sixth and early seventh-century Kingdom of Dál Riata, corresponding approximately to modern counties of Argyll in Scotland and Antrim in Ulster, straddled the North Channel.

• From the 1390s the powerbase of the MacDonald Lords of the Isles straddled the North Channel as a result of the marriage of Ian Mor to Margery Bisset, heiress to the Glens of Antrim.

• The Scottish settlers came from Lanarkshire, Ayrshire, the Borders and the Lothians.