The ash that once grew here was felled some years ago, but the memory attached to it has outlasted the timber. Writing in 1896, a researcher named Byrne recorded it as a stunted ash growing on poor soil in a lofty, bleak situation, which is not exactly the kind of description that suggests a place of beauty or comfort. That, in its way, seems fitting.

The legend rooted here concerns St Cranat, a woman whose beauty was widely celebrated but who had committed herself to a religious vocation under St Brigid. When a young prince of Munster became infatuated with her and pressed his attentions, she refused him. His companions then took matters further and captured her. Rather than submit, Cranat disfigured herself, pulling out one of her own eyes. Where it fell to the ground, the ash tree grew. The story belongs to a pattern familiar in early Irish hagiography, in which female saints resist unwanted pursuit through radical acts of self-sacrifice, but the particular detail here, the eye becoming a tree rooted in that exposed hillside soil, gives the legend an unusually stark quality. Holy trees of this kind were often ash or whitethorn, regarded as markers of sacred ground, and the veneration attached to them could survive long after the physical tree had gone.

The site sits at the roadside and is not fenced or formally marked, but the persistence of local knowledge about it suggests that the association with Cranat has not been forgotten, even if the tree that embodied it is gone.