Towards the end of the fifth century, however, there took place among them a settlement of an Irish people who were already Christian. These were Scots from the district in Ireland termed Dalriada, forming the north-eastern part of Ulster, and extending from the river Ravel to the Bann. We are told in the Lives of St. Patrick that he visited this district of Dalriada, and founded several churches in it; and that when he again revisited it for the purpose of confirming and extending the faith, he found the twelve sons of Erc in possession of the sovereignty, and prophesied of one of them, Fergus mor, son of Erc, that he should be a king, and that the kings of that land, and also of Fortren, in the land of the southern Picts, should descend from him;[70] and Tighernac records that ‘Fergus mor, son of Erc, with the people of Dalriada, takes possession of part of Britain and dies there.’ They appear to have landed in Kintyre and spread from thence along the coasts of Argyll, which from them took the name of Dalriada. For sixty years they appear to have gradually , until their extended their possessions encroachment upon the land of the Picts, towards the north, brought down upon them Brude, son of Maelcu, the powerful king of the northern Picts, from whom they sustained a great defeat; and they were for the time driven back into Kintyre. This Dalriadic people brought their Christian religion with them, and, during this period of sixty years of their advance into the country, appear to have extended themselves as far as the island of Mull, so as to embrace the island of Iona within their bounds, for in this island we are told the three sons of Erc—Loarn, Fergus, and Angus—were buried; and Fordun is probably recording real events when he tells us that Domangart, the son of Fergus, and Gabran his grandson, after whose death the Dalriads were driven back to Kintyre, were buried here.[71] There does appear, in fact, to have been in the island of Iona, even at this early period, a Christian establishment of that peculiar collegiate form which appears at this time in Ireland: for among the groups of seven bishops whom Angus the Culdee invokes in his Litany, we find ‘the seven bishops of Hii’; and again, apparently the same group, as ‘the seven bishops of the church of Ia,’ another form of the name of the island.[72]