Turlough Roe and the Plantation of Ulster

O’Boyle’s grant was located west of Sheephaven Bay in the parish of Clondahorky.  In Pynnars Survey of 1619 it is noted that Turlough, “along with his tenants and followers hath removed to the proportion assigned unto them”.  He “hath 2,000 acres called Carrobleagh and Clomas, he hath built a good bawn (a fortified enclosure) and a house of stone and lime in which he and his family dwelleth”. Building a solid, fortified stone house was a condition of a land grant for the English and Scottish settlers, and probably for the Irish as well.

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The house is described as 'of clay and stone rough cast with lime, 48 ft long, 25 ft broad and 13 ft high… Adjoining to this house, there are three stone houses and a timber house, thatched'.  Elements of this house are believed to be incorporated into the large stone house at Faugher, near Portnablagh (the ruins of which still stand.  

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But he is slow to adopt English ways: “He hath made no estates, and all his tenants doth plough after the Irish manner”. Within a few years, Turlough mortgaged the lands and house to Englishman John Stanton and in 1622 Mrs. Stanton is living there, with four English tenants on the land [Philips and Hadsor survey]. Why he mortgaged it is unclear, but there are some suggestions that he may not have stayed on his new estate, and instead moved back to live at Kiltoorish as a tenant and managed his own estate remotely.

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Many years after the date when he was required to remove to his new estate, Turlough Roe  is still frequently referred to as O’Boyle ‘of Kiltoorish’. This was the site of one of their principal pre-Plantation fortified houses, located in Boylagh on lands from which he had been evicted.  He is reported to have received visitors there from Spain in the 1620s, no doubt for reasons of political intrigue and conspiracy. And at a time when the Catholic bishop of Raphoe was lamenting the fact that there were so few natives of any substance that he had difficulty maintaining himself, his Vicar-General, Conor O’Boyle was being sheltered and supported by his ‘wealthy kinsman’ Turlough at his house at Kiltoorish.

So he doesn’t seem to have been short of money. Though it was the fate of many of those Gaels who had received a grant of land to lose it through mortgages and debt, this was not yet the case with Turlough O’Boyle. By 1641 he had increased his land holdings to over 4,000 acres in the parishes of Clondahorky and Raymunterdoney and was one of the very few Gaelic nobles to increase his holding after the Plantation. It seems that MacSweeney Banagh, who had also been dispossessed and granted land in Kilmacrenan, may have sold his grant to O’Boyle in order to remain on his family lands in Banagh, where he is recorded to have “bought grazing of Alexander Kernes”.

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In 1622 the proportion of Boylagh Outragh (UpperBoylagh) which was based on the old O’Boyle territory of Ballyboyle and was close to Donegal town had only 27 British settlers of which seventeen were ‘meanly armed’. The isolated west coast of the county had virtually no British settlers and no inhabited fortifications. As well as those displaced from the good lands in the east of the county where there were large numbers of Scottish incomers, the majority of the O’Boyle sept remained in their native territory under the new owners usually paying more than Scottish or English tenants were willing to pay and on shorter leasing arrangements. At Boylagh Eightra (Lower Boylagh) around Ardara "there is nothing at all built, and all the land is inhabited with Irish". "Teige Oge O'Boyle, a meere (pure) Irishman" held the quarter of Mace (Maas) on a lease from the Earl of Annandale in 1620, and several other O'Boyles were tenants of Sir Ralph Dutton in the Rosses. 

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An official British report in 1623 points out that this was a very unsatisfactory situation as these areas became the heartland of the Gaelic Irish native population in county Donegal throughout the 17th century, “and most of them continue there as tenants, a dangerous and discontented people, and full of fastnesses”[McGettigan 2010].

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