History of Derry
The claim that he founded a settlement at Doire is less certain, although that monastery belonged to the federation of Columban churches which looked to Colmcille as their spiritual founder and leader.
On April 16, 1600, Sir Henry Docwra's English force of 4,000 soldiers dismantled the ruins, using the stones to construct the defensive walls and ramparts of Derry.
On this occasion the English managed to hold on to Derry and, when the war came to an end in 1603, a small trading settlement was established and given the legal status of city.
This attack came about shortly after the Flight of the Earls when the O'Neill and O'Donnell chieftains, together with their principal supporters, fled to the continent, leaving Gaelic Ulster leaderless.
In 1623 the new county granted to the Londoners and its fortified city, built across the River Foyle from the recently destroyed settlement, were renamed Londonderry in honour of this association.
It was laid out according to the best contemporary principles of town planning, imported from the continent (the original street lay-out has survived to the present almost intact).
For the next ten years of war, Derry and its environs became a stronghold for the British Protestant settlers, who raised the "Lagan army" to defend themselves from the Irish Confederates.
In 1649 the city and its garrison, which supported the republican Parliament in London, were besieged by Scottish Presbyterian (Covenanter) forces loyal to King Charles I.
The Parliamentarians besieged in Derry were relieved by a strange alliance of Roundhead troops under George Monck and Owen O Neill, during a brief civil war within the Irish Confederacy.
James II had his Catholic viceroy Richard Talbot, 1st Earl of Tyrconnell take action to ensure that all strong points in Ireland were held by garrisons loyal to the Jacobite cause.
An army of around 1,200 men, mostly "Redshanks" (Highlanders), under Alexander MacDonnell, 3rd Earl of Antrim, was slowly organised (they set out on the week William of Orange landed in England).
On 18 April 1689, while his attempts to regain his throne in what became the Williamite war in Ireland with the Jacobites got under way, King James came to the city and summoned it to surrender.
Finally at the end of July, a relief ship broke the barricading 'boom' which had been stretched across the river, near where the new Foyle Bridge now stands.
In July 1920, several thousand unionist ex-British Army servicemen mobilised a pogrom of murder against the Catholic population which they regarded as rebellious.
[citation needed] In 1921, following the Anglo-Irish Treaty and the partition of Ireland, Derry unexpectedly became a border city, with much of its natural economic hinterland in County Donegal cut off.
[citation needed] During the Second World War the city played an important part in the Battle of the Atlantic with a substantial presence from the Royal Navy and a large number of GIs disembarked here.
Overcrowding in nationalist areas was widely blamed on the political agenda of the unionist government, who wanted to confine Catholics to a small number of electoral wards.
The events that followed the August 1969 Apprentice Boys parade resulted in the Battle of the Bogside, when Catholic rioters fought the police, leading to widespread civil disorder in Northern Ireland and is often dated as the starting point of the Troubles.
[8] On Sunday 30 January 1972, 13 unarmed civilians were shot dead by British paratroopers during a civil rights march in the Bogside area.
In the words of Eamonn McCann in his book, "War and an Irish Town", the city centre "looked as if it had been bombed from the air".
Irish journalist Ed Maloney claims in The Secret History of the IRA that republican leaders there negotiated a de facto ceasefire in the city as early as 1991.
Less well-known is its reputation voted by the Civic Trust in London as one of the ten best cities of its kind to live in, in the United Kingdom.
