Building on lessons learnt during the plantations of Laois, Offaly and Munster in the second half of the sixteenth century, regarding the need for towns to ensure successful plantation, the scheme devised for the colonisation of Ulster in the early seventeenth century contained formal plans for the creation of a network of towns across the recently seized lands.
The establishment and development of this urban network, over a relatively short period of time and almost from scratch, transformed Ulster’s cultural landscape and economy. In this paper, I outline the locations and numbers of towns planned provide reasons for the sites selected, and detail the layout, morphology and function of some of these towns. The towns that are focused on in this paper are those which were formally established as part of the plantation, given charters and ‘incorporated’.