Thornbush (Site of), Brockagh, Co. Wicklow

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Holy Sites & Wells

Thornbush (Site of), Brockagh, Co. Wicklow

On the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of County Wicklow, every edition marks the same spot in Brockagh with the word "Thornbush".

It is a precise, confident label for something that, by the time anyone went looking, was no longer there. The bush in question was known as St. Kevin's Bush, associated with the early medieval saint whose name is woven through the whole Glendalough valley, and its disappearance has left behind only a faint hollow in the landscape and a cartographic ghost.

Writing in 1972, Healy recorded what the site still held at that point: a semi-circular bank about twelve metres across, partly cut into the hillside and partly constructed from large boulders and stones, with a line of dry-stone walling running within the curve of the bank. The location sits on the northern bank of the valley, directly above the feature known as the Keeve, and St. Kevin's Road, the old pilgrimage route through the hills, runs along the north side of the same spot. Holy bushes of this kind were common features of early Irish devotional landscapes, often hawthorns or thorns growing beside a well or a saint's reputed resting place, visited on pattern days and sometimes hung with offerings. The earthwork that survives suggests the bush once sat within a deliberately shaped enclosure rather than simply growing wild, which points to some degree of organised veneration rather than informal local custom.

The bush itself is gone, and subsequent visits have found no surface trace of it. What remains is the stony bank Healy described, quietly visible if you know to look for it, on a hillside that most walkers pass through on their way to somewhere else entirely.

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