In the north of this kingdom, on the west side of Lough Arrow, Patrick founded a church in a district which still bears the old name of Aghanagh; and east of the same lake, at the extreme border of Tirerrill, the parish of Shancoe enables us to fix the whereabouts of another church which he established at Senchua. There is a curious piece of evidence which suggests that Christianity had already made an attempt to win a footing in these regions. When Patrick ordained[113] a certain Ailbe, who belonged to the family of Ailill, to the rank of priest, he told him of the existence of a “wonderful” subterranean stone altar in the Mountain of the Children of Ailill. There were four glass chalices at the four corners of the altar, and Patrick warned Ailbe to beware of breaking the edges of the excavation. As Shancoe was Ailbe’s church, we are entitled to infer that the altar was somewhere in the Bralieve hills, which are in that district.[114] It is clear that, if the tradition is genuine, Patrick had seen the place himself, and the story implies that it was not he who had set the altar in the lonely spot on the mountains, but that it had been used in older days and abandoned. No commemorative name has survived to mark the place of another church in the same regions which owed its origin to Patrick, the Cell Angle;[115] but what seems to have been the most important foundation of all was farther north, in the parish of Tawnagh,[116] still called as it was called when he first gave it a place on the ecclesiastical map of Ireland. It seems probable that in his first journey Patrick also visited the north of Sligo, and consecrated Brón bishop for a church founded at Caisselire. This place was on the sea-shore, under the massive hill of Knocknaree, which dominates on the west the modern town of Sligo, and the name Killespugbrone[117] still preserves the memory of the fifth-century bishop. He also worked in the regions south of Lake Gara, where Sachall, whom we shall presently meet as a bishop, became his pupil.[118] Thence he may have journeyed southward through the plains and wilds of Kerry,[119] founding some churches on his way, till he came to the lake country on the confines of Mayo and Galway. Then he turned westward through Carra and founded the church of Achad-fobuir. The old name has clung to the place—Aghagower, and in ancient times it had ecclesiastical importance.[120] It marks clearly a stage in the apostle’s progress to the famous mountain to which his visit gave a new name. [Sidenote: CROCHAN AIGLI]