Columcille was yet a young man, only twenty-five years of age, when he founded Derry, but both his own genius, and more especially his great friends and kinsfolk, had conspired to make him famous. For the next seventeen years he laboured in Ireland, and during this time founded the still more celebrated schools of Durrow in the present King's County, and of Kells in Meath, both of which became most famous in after years. Durrow,[7] which, like Derry, was named from the beautiful groves of oak which were scattered along the slope of Druim-caín, or "the pleasant hill," seems to have retained to the last a hold upon the affections of Columcille second only to that of Derry. When its abbot, Cormac the voyager, visited him long years afterwards in Iona, and expressed his unwillingness to return to his monastery again, because, being a Momonian of the race of Eber, the southern Ui Neill were jealous of him, and made his abbacy unpleasant or impossible, Columcille reproached him in pathetic terms for abandoning so lovely an abode-- "With its books and its learning, A devout city with a hundred crosses." "O Cormac," he exclaimed-- "I pledge thee mine unerring word Which it is not possible to impugn, Death is better in reproachless Erin Than perpetual life in Alba [Scotland]."[8] And on another occasion, when it strikes him how happy the son of Dima, _i.e._, Cormac, must be at the approach of summer along the green hillside of Rosgrencha--another name for Durrow--amid its fair slopes, waving woods, and singing birds, compared with himself exiled to the barren shores of rugged Iona, he bursts forth into the tenderest song-- "How happy the son is of Dima! no sorrow For him is designed, He is having, this hour, round his own cell in Durrow The wish of his mind: The sound of the wind in the elms, like the strings of A harp being played, The note of the blackbird that claps with the wings of Delight in the glade. With him in Rosgrencha the cattle are lowing At earliest dawn, On the brink of the summer the pigeons are cooing And doves on his lawn," etc.[9]