You know of course, for only a gulpen doesn’t, that docken leaves can cure the nettle sting. You must recite the couplet, while you’re rubbing the afflicted spot,
‘Docken, docken, in and out,
Take the sting of the nettle out!’
Ringworm is a little more complicated. It takes two boys, whose father and mother is living, who go to the person who has the charm. The boys are given three horse-shoe nails to be driven into some immovable part of the house in which the person affected lives. One boy drives them in half-way, the other boy completes the job. Usually the nails were driven into a beam in the kitchen. If the sufferer was a man then it was two girls who went for the charm.
Warts could be cured in many ways. There’s a wart stone in the field adjacent to the Kilnasaggart Stone in Carrickbroad where the afflicted appendage could be inserted and the wart would thereafter quickly disappear. Most of us have learned that they could be cured too by rubbing with freshly killed red meat. The meat is then buried and as it decays the warts disappear. At home, we settled for the rub of a potato sliced in two. It also had to be buried thereafter and the warts disappeared as it rotted in the ground. Snails would do the same job. Cut it open, you must and rub it on the wart. Then you stick it on a thorn and as it withers away, away goes your wart.