Berchan, where it is said of Columba— Woe to the Cruithnigh to whom he will go eastward, He knew the thing that is Nor was it happy with him that an Erinach Should be king in the east under the Cruithnigh.[141] The death of Conall, son of Comgall, king of Dalriada, in the thirteenth year of his reign, is recorded by Tighernac, and he adds that a battle was fought in Kintyre, at a place called Delgon, in that year, in which his son Duncan and a large number of the tribe of Gabran were slain.[142] This battle seems to have been a further attack by the Picts with the view of suppressing them altogether, as the same poem thus alludes to it:— Thirteen years altogether, Against the hosts of the Cruithnigh, mild the illustrious. When he died he was not king, On Thursday in Kintyre.[143] The death of Conall opened the succession to the children of Gabran according to the law of tanistry, and so far as we can gather from a statement in Adamnan’s Life of St. Columba, it fell to Eoganan to fill the throne, but St. Columba was led by a vision to prefer his brother Aidan, whom he solemnly inaugurated as king of Dalriada, in the island of Iona.[144] It is more probable that he was led to prefer Aidan from his possessing qualities which pointed him out as the fittest man to redeem the fortunes of the Dalriads, and took this mode of giving a sanction to his choice, which Aidan appears soon to have vindicated, as he is termed in the Albanic Duan ‘king of many divisions,’[145] that is, of extended territories. The Dalriads seem, as yet, to have been considered as forming a part of Irish Dalriada, and as a colony from them, to have been still subject to the mother tribe; but St. Columba resolved to proceed a step further, and to make him an independent king. Accordingly he, along with Aidan, attended a great council held at Drumceat in the year 575, when a discussion arose between him and the king of Ireland as to the future position of Scotch Dalriada towards Ireland, and it was agreed that the Scotch Dalriads should be freed from all tributes and exactions, but should join with the Irish Dalriads, as the parent stock, in all hostings and expeditions.[146] Aidan thus became, as it were, the second founder of the Dalriadic colony in Scotland, and its first monarch as an independent kingdom.[147] [Sidenote: The Saxons.]