The problem is that nobody can say exactly which one it is. When surveyors visited the site at Gearhanagoul, they found a dense clump of gorse growing up to two metres high, and recorded the presence of a so-called blessed bush in the area. But nothing about the tangle of vegetation marked out any single plant as the one carrying the designation. The bush was simply there, and not there, at the same time.

The tradition belongs to a cluster of sacred geography centred on St Feaghna, an early Irish saint whose name is preserved across several features in this part of south-west Kerry. Roughly 200 metres to the north-west lie the ruins of Temple Feaghna, a small early church, and about 150 metres in the same direction sits Toberfeaghna, a holy well. Holy wells and blessed trees or bushes frequently appear together in Irish early Christian and folk devotion, forming loose constellations of sacred sites that accumulated around a founding saint's name across many centuries. The bush at Gearhanagoul fits this pattern, anchored to St Feaghna by local memory even if the physical marker has blurred into an anonymous thicket of gorse.

That blurring is itself part of what makes the place quietly interesting. In many parts of Ireland, a lone hawthorn or whitethorn is the conventional form of a blessed or fairy tree, conspicuous and avoided with care. Here the sanctity has dispersed into a communal clump of gorse, the individual plant no longer legible. Whether the bush was always plural, or whether the original marker was lost and the tradition migrated loosely to whatever grew nearby, is not recorded. What remains is the name, the association, and a field full of thorns in a river valley in Kerry.