Beyond the Black Pig's Dyke

Beyond the Black Pig's Dyke is a concise history of Ireland's most fascinating province, from pre-history to the Republican and Loyalist ceasefires and the peace talks at the end of 1994. Drawing on the latest historical sources, it seeks to give an even-handed and accessible account of a region that has become associated with conflict but that has also made an immeasurable contribution to science, to the arts and to the development of liberal nonconformist political thought.The geological legacy of the Ice Age was a natural barrier of drumlins and wetland between Ulster and the rest of Ireland. Early settlers supplemented nature's work with their own earthworks and the most famous of these barriers was known as the Black Pig's Dyke. In direct contrast, the Ulster planters, mainly Scots, who colonised Ulster in the cataclysmic seventeenth century, regarded the North Channel not as a boundary but as an inland sea. Part of Ireland yet separate, and with adamantine links with Britain, it is small wonder that Ulster's history has been eventful and turbulent.