The phrase "na Saggard" derives from the Irish word for priest, and Shane na Saggard, loosely translated, means Shane of the Priests. That a tree should be named after such a figure, and that the name should survive long enough to be formally recorded as a monument, suggests this is no ordinary landmark.

The name almost certainly connects to the period of the Penal Laws, roughly spanning the late seventeenth to early nineteenth centuries, when the practice of Catholicism was heavily restricted under British administration in Ireland. Priests were outlawed, hunted, and forced to celebrate Mass at outdoor locations, often marked by a rock, a hillside, or a distinctive tree. A man named Shane who was associated with sheltering, guiding, or perhaps betraying priests in the Ballintober area would have left exactly this kind of trace on the local landscape, a name attached to a place as a form of communal memory. Ballintober itself is closely associated with Ballintober Abbey, an Augustinian foundation of the early thirteenth century that remarkably continued to function through the Penal era, so the broader landscape here has long carried a particular religious weight.

Beyond its name and its county, the specific details of this tree, its species, precise location, age, and the full story behind Shane himself, remain unrecorded in publicly available sources. What can be said is that named trees of this kind are genuinely rare survivals. Most Penal-era memory exists in oral tradition or place names rather than in stone, and the formal recognition of a tree as a monument worth recording places this one in a very select category.