Docwra's Derry

Reprinted November 2007; first published 2003. It is widely accepted that no understanding of modern Irish history is complete without an awareness of events in the 17th century. This is true in particular of the Ulster Plantation. Sir Henry Docwra’s military expedition, which arrived in Lough Foyle in May 1600, at the height of the Nine Years War, was instrumental in paving the way for James I’s Plantation of Ulster that began only a few years later … after Docwra, the English stayed. The decis