Ards and the Wray Family
An article on the history of the Wray family in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Wrays were the owners of the Ards Estate before it was purchased by the Stewarts in 1781. It is noted that in about 1700 William Wray ‘bought 5,000 acres of land between Dunfanaghy and Doe from William Sampson’. The article adds: 'In 1781 the estate was sold to Mr Alexander Stewart, brother of the first Marquess of Londonderry and uncle of the infamous Lord Castlereagh, for the sum of £13,250 in order t
Details
- Level of description
- Item
- Date
- c.1935
- Reference
- 8
- Extent and medium
- 8 pp; Typescript
- Scope and content
- An article on the history of the Wray family in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Wrays were the owners of the Ards Estate before it was purchased by the Stewarts in 1781. It is noted that in about 1700 William Wray ‘bought 5,000 acres of land between Dunfanaghy and Doe from William Sampson’. The article adds: 'In 1781 the estate was sold to Mr Alexander Stewart, brother of the first Marquess of Londonderry and uncle of the infamous Lord Castlereagh, for the sum of £13,250 in order to meet the owner’s debts'. An appendix to the article includes some brief notes on the Stewarts of Ards compiled by Fr. T.J. Walsh, a diocesan priest in Cork.
- Repository
- Irish Capuchin Archives
- Context
- Irish Capuchin Archives > Papers of Ard Mhuire Capuchin Friary, County Donegal > Historical Research
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- Rights
- Copyright held by the respective institution. Contact the archive for reproduction permissions.
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Sample passages
- And so it happened that William Wray bought 5,500 acres of land between Dunfanaghy and Doe from William Sampson. His first wife had been Ann Sampson and it was from her family he n…
- and entered F.C.D. in 1757. He embarked on an army career but gambling and a wild character ruined him. He died in obscurity and poverty in Paris. In 1781 the estate was sold to Mr…
- No account of the last Wray of Ards would be complete without a reference to the famous altercation between him and Captain Stewart of Horn Head. We saw earlier how Sampson had sol…
Full Transcript (OCR, 8 pages)
Machine-generated OCR transcript. Handwritten material may contain recognition errors.
Page 1
CATOL/7/8 Ards and the Wrays After the suppression of the great Rebellion in the reagn of Queen Elizabeth more than a half million acres of land in the north of Ireland were at the disposal of the English Crown. The whole county of Donegal fell to the King after the later insurrection of Sir Cahir O'Doherty (a Donegal chieftain) which was suppressed in 1608. At this time, five other northern counties suffered the same fate - Tyrone, Derry, Fermanagh, Cavan and Armagh. So the way was clear for the Plantation of Ulster which took place in 1610; English and Scotish settlers were given land in Ulster, and men who were solders of fortune, professional adventurers or cadets of good families for the most part became the masters of huge tracts of land in the north of Ireland. Many of them found their way into Donegal, and may be distinguished into two kinds: 1) those who arrived on the suppression of O'Donnell's rebellion at the end of Elizabeth's reign; 2) those who settled under James I in 1610. The former were almost all of English descent, whereas the latter were Scottish. In Donegal the chief families of the former were the Brookes, the Harts of Doe Castle, the Sampsons, and the Wrays of Castle Wray and Ards. Sampson has a vast tract of wild mountain range lying on the sea, and now comprehending Horn Head and Ards. Little is known of John Wray of Carnegilla, the first Wray to come to Donegal. He was probably one of the Wrays of Ashby; formerly of Ex Durham, the family moved to Glenworth in Yorkshire. He probably came to Ireland at the end of the sixteenth century and was assigned (or bought) 1000 acres of Carnegilla near Letterkenny. He was an alderman in the first corporation in Derry and was later Mayor of that city. He and his wife, Frances, had 8 children, of whom the eldest son, Henry, succeeded to the estate. John died in 1624. Henry got a further grant from the Crown in 1639 of lands, afterwards called Castle Wray, near Lough Swilly together with free fishing in that vast fiord. He probably died while on military service, and his memorial tablet in Letterkenny Church pays tribute to his ex worth: "Et juste et Vrya." He died in 1652 survived by his wife, Elizabeth Gore, and 6 children. Henry Wray's son was William Wray who was living in Castle Wray in 1689.
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