This unique talk will use three forgotten Ulster-Scots texts to tell stories of ordinary lives and historical upheaval in the area we now call east Belfast, from the 17th to the 19th century. These texts are The Montgomery Manuscripts, the Ulster-Scots poems of Francis Boyle - and the novel Berna Boyle, by Mrs. Riddell (Charlotte Cowan). Can exploring these stories, their language, and the cultures that produced them, reveal a hidden Ulster-Scots prehistory to writing in east Belfast?