Marks of Time
Historic Buildings as  illustrations of the past.
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The Plantation


A plantation is  normally  understood to be a large area of land organised to produce a cash  crop such as  bananas or cotton. It is often carved out of a jungle or other  such  ‘unproductive’ area. In Ireland, in the seventeenth century, it meant a similar thing i.e. the organised settlement of land with people from England and lowland Scotland, to bring what was  considered an unproductive area into the wider economy. 
 
The City of London was reluctantly persuaded by the  King to carry out the work in the newly created county of ‘Londonderry’. 12 Merchant Companies received extensive  lands but had to comply with strict conditions including the construction of two
defensible ‘bawns’ on each of their ‘proportions’.   This is Brackfield Bawn on the Skinner’s proportion halfway from the city  to Dungiven. It was a stone built house with a courtyard in front  defended by circular towers or ‘flankers’ at the corners.

The 12 companies  came together to  build new towns at Derry  and Coleraine  creating a new company for the purpose: The Honourable the  Irish Society. This  is a copy of a plan of the new city of ‘Londonderry’   drawn in 1625. The grid iron layout  influenced by Roman plans via the  Renaissance can be clearly seen. The focus is
the market square and not the  church as befitting a post-Medieval city. It is  an ‘ideal’ plan for a new  frontier settlement testing out the latest urban  theories. The stone walls  around it likewise show the influence of continental  ideas. They are low and  thick to absorb cannon fire and provided with angular  ‘bastions’ to permit  flanking fire along the  wall.
 


 

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Brackfield Bawn
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Londonderry, 1625.
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City Wall
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