All a person had to do, according to local tradition, was grasp it. The tree is gone now, leaving behind no physical trace, only a name on an old map and a handful of lines recorded by Ordnance Survey fieldworkers in the late 1830s.

The Ordnance Survey Field Name Books, compiled between 1837 and 1840 as part of the ambitious project to map and document Ireland townland by townland, placed the tree about thirty chains (roughly 600 metres) west-south-west of the Seven Churches, on the southern side of the road to Shannon Bridge. It was noted simply as the Meenadugh Tree, and the surveyors recorded what the local people said about it: that it possessed the power of curing certain diseases in any person who could grasp it. The tree was already described as old at that point, and it was associated with St Kieran, the sixth-century founder of Clonmacnoise, one of the most significant early medieval monastic sites in Ireland. That association with a founding saint was typical of holy trees, which across Ireland often served as focal points for folk devotion and healing practice, occupying a space somewhere between Christian tradition and older ideas about sacred landscape. The act of grasping or touching, rather than praying at or leaving offerings beside, is a relatively specific detail, and an unusual one.

Nothing of the tree survives. The six-inch Ordnance Survey map marks its location, but no physical remains have been recorded. What persists is the name, and the brief, matter-of-fact account of a community that believed a tree could heal you, if only you could hold on to it.