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, 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]