Ida fell in battle, slain, say the British authorities, by Owen of Reged, whose father Urien, the favourite hero of the bards, and a warrior from whom many a laurel has been stolen to adorn the chaplet of the fabulous Arthur, was hailed unanimously as leader of a confederacy which was to drive the invader from the soil. The tide of conquest was now rolled back upon the Angles, Bryneich was recovered, and the sons of Ida were driven from the land, when at the very moment of his triumph the bravest champion of his race fell by the dagger of “Llovan of the accursed hand,” and his death was fatal to his countrymen. Step by step the Angles recovered their ascendency, winning their way at the point of the sword, until the whole of the eastern coast was wrested from its original possessors, confined henceforth to the westward of “the Desert,” and the Northumbrian kingdoms of Deira and Bernicia rose out of the ruins of the conquered British principalities.[3] A solitary entry in the annals of the Irish abbot, Tighernach, affords the earliest historical testimony of the arrival of a small, but in many respects a remarkable, band of colonists, about fifty years before the settlement of an Anglian population in the Lothians, upon the rocky and indented coasts of southern Argyle. [Sidenote: A. D. 502.] Fergus Mor MacEarca, a chieftain of the Irish Gael, was their leader, and the north-eastern extremity of the modern county of Antrim, which, at that time, formed part of the territories of the Irish Picts, was the locality which they abandoned when they crossed the channel in their leathern coracles in search of another home upon the shores of Britain. Amidst the lakes and mountains to the southward of Loch Linne, Fergus and his followers fixed their new abode; and the limits of his petty kingdom, which were never enlarged, are still traceable in the names implanted by succeeding princes upon the dependent districts of Lorn, Cowal, and Kintyre. These principalities, with a few of the islands off the coast of southern Argyle, made up, collectively, the whole of the kingdom of Dalriada--for such was its real name; though in the Latin chronicles of a later age, Fergus and his descendants invariably appear under the more familiar appellation of “Kings of the Scots.” The annals of the Dalriads are totally devoid of interest before the reign of Conal, fourth in succession from Fergus Mor, who, by the shelter he afforded to the exiled Abbot of Durrow, indirectly furthered the conversion of the northern Picts to Christianity.[4]