Every Deglan's Day, the 24th of July, and the Sunday nearest to it, thousands of people come from all over the Decies, from twenty miles away, to the "pattern," and anyone who has anything the matter with him, either disease or pain or sickness, goes in under that stone, and believes firmly in his mind that he will be healed. Hundreds do that yet, up to the present day.
About fifteen years ago the "pattern" was growing small and dying out, but a feis, the second feis in Ireland [in modern times] was held on Deglan's Sunday, and thousands and thousands of people came to it, and there had not been such a "pattern" for fifty years. I myself have often seen people passing under the stones.
Every second person in the "seana-phoball," and in the parish of Ardmore also, is called Deglan down to the present day. Scarcely a month passes that a child is not christened Deglan. The explanation that the people give of the name of the parish called "Seana-phoball," or Old Parish, is that Deglan had made a parish of it and that there were Christians there before there was a parish, or before there were Christians in any other place in Ireland, and "old phoball" is the same as "old paróiste" or parish.
[The above story is the folk version of part of the following, which is here translated for the first time from an Irish MS. in my own possession. St. Deglan's church is spoken of in the MS. as still standing, and his miraculous stone as being still preserved there when the account was written. This throws back the account many hundreds of years. I collated my MS. carefully with one written in 1758 [23 M 50], preserved in R.I.A. It has never been printed, but I believe my friend, Father Power, will soon publish the entire life of St. Deglan.]
And the people of the island concealed the ship so that Deglan could not embark on it, for they disliked it greatly that Deglan should inhabit it, for fear they themselves might be banished out of it.
His disciples then said to Deglan, "Father, thou often requirest to come to this place. We pray thee to avoid it, and mayest thou receive from God that the sea should ebb away from the land so that people may go into it with dry feet, for Christ has said that whatever shall be asked of My Father in My name He shall give it you, for it is not easy for thou to inhabit this place or to protect it."