Its absence is itself the curiosity. The spot appears on the third edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map from 1932, carefully noted by whoever compiled it, yet no physical trace survives today. What remains is a location, a cartographic memory, and a piece of local knowledge connecting the vanished bush to a nearby house of religious women.

Holy trees and holy bushes, often hawthorns, were once a familiar feature of the Irish countryside. They were understood as sacred, sometimes associated with a saint or a well, and were treated with considerable care; to cut or damage one was considered deeply unlucky. The bush at Curraghaun was linked, according to local tradition, to the nunnery of Kilcreevanty, a medieval religious house in the same part of County Galway. Whether it marked a boundary, a path, or simply a point of devotion connected to the nuns is not recorded. What is clear is that someone in the early twentieth century still considered it significant enough to mark on a map, and that the local memory of its association with Kilcreevanty survived long enough to be collected and written down.

There is nothing to see here now. The rise in the pasture remains, but the bush is gone, and no marker has replaced it. That gap between the map and the ground is, in its own way, the whole story: a small sacred thing that mattered to people for long enough to be recorded twice, once in cartography and once in living memory, and has since quietly disappeared.