Known as Cranavilla, it was recorded on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map, and around 1840 the scholar John O'Donovan noted in the OS Name Books that unbaptised children were buried beneath it. Nothing of the tree survives today, but the record of what happened there is quietly arresting.

The burial of unbaptised infants was a widespread and painful feature of Irish life well into the twentieth century. Catholic doctrine held that children who died before baptism could not be admitted to consecrated ground, leaving families with few formal options. In practice, communities across Ireland found their own solutions, and particular trees, field boundaries, or liminal landscape features became the unofficial resting places for these children. The ash tree at Ballycuddy Beg was one such place. That it earned its own placename, Cranavilla, and was prominent enough to be marked on the Ordnance Survey map, suggests it carried real local significance for generations. O'Donovan's note, brief as it is, preserves a detail that might otherwise have vanished entirely from the record.