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, which is generally considered to have been located in the graveyard of the current village Catholic church. 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
edit- ^ a b 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
- ^ Shirley, Evelyn Philip (1879). The History of the County of Monaghan, p. 301, at Google Books. London: Pickering and Co. p. 301.
- ^ "St. Dympna's Holy Well", Tydavnet Village Community Centre
