Damnat

Saint Damnat (Irish: Damhnait; also known as Davnet or Dymphna) was a nun who seems to have lived and died at Tydavnet (from Tech nDamnat, meaning "House of Damnat") at Sliabh Beagh, County Monaghan, Ireland.[1] Tradition speaks of Saint Damnat as a virgin and the founder of a church or monastery. A bachall (staff) said to have belonged to her has been preserved; in the past it was used as a lie detector.[2] It is now in the National Museum of Ireland in Dublin.[1]

She is sometimes confused with Dymphna, the saint of Geel in Flanders, since John Colgan identified them as the same person in the mid seventeenth century. Both George Petrie and John O’Donovan of the antiquities division of the Ordnance Survey c.1830/40s doubted the link between the two names.[3]

References
  1. Charles-Edwards, T.M., "Ulster, saints of (act. c.400–c.650)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2007, accessed 31 Oct 2014
  2. Shirley, Evelyn Philip (1879). The History of the County of Monaghan, p. 301, at Google Books. London: Pickering and Co. p. 301.
  3. "St. Dympna's Holy Well", Tydavnet Village Community Centre
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