appears to have gone to the Western Islands, and to have founded in one of the islands a monastery called Ailech, and a church and its surrounding village in the land of Heth, and then returned to Ireland.[155] This land of Heth we now know to have been the island of Tyree,[156] but the precise situation of the other it is more difficult to fix. It must, however, certainly be looked for in one of the islands belonging to Britain.[157] The name of Brendan is connected with more than one of the Western Isles. Fordun tells us that the island of Bute bore the name of Rothesay ‘until, when the faith of our Saviour had been diffused through all the ends of the earth, and the islands which are afar off, Saint Brandan constructed thereon a booth—in our idiom, _bothe_, that is, a shrine.’[158] But though the old chronicler’s etymology of the name of Bute is bad, the name of Brendan is preserved in the designation given to the people of Bute of ‘the Brandanes,’ and in the Kilbrandan Sound, which separates the island of Arran from Kintyre. The principal church in the island of Seil, which lies off the coast of Lorn, is also dedicated to Brendan, and one of the small islands forming the group called the Garveloch Isles, bears the name of Culbrandan, or the retreat of Brendan. This island is next to that called _Eilean na Naoimh_, or the Island of the Saints, and as the latter appears to have borne the name of Elachnave,[159] it is not impossible that here may have been the monastery of Aileach. This visit to the Western Isles took place some time before the foundation of his principal monastery in Ireland, that of Clonfert, the date of which is known to have been 559; and we shall probably not be far wrong if we fix the the year 545 as the probable date. [Sidenote: Mission of Saint Columba to Britain.]