Belturbet’s Plantation Groundwork
The formal Plantation centred on six counties where extensive lands had escheated to the Crown: Armagh, Cavan, Coleraine, Donegal, Fermanagh and Tyrone. This was not the whole of Ulster. Antrim and Down, for example, had already attracted substantial private settlement, particularly from Scotland. But the six escheated counties became the arena for a much more systematic Crown programme, designed in Dublin and London and justified as a means of security, revenue, Protestant reform and ‘civil’ order.