There are three or four of them, windswept and flat-topped in the way of trees that have spent years negotiating an Atlantic headwind. They would be easy to pass without a second glance, and yet they appear by name on Ordnance Survey maps going back to 1842, which is not the kind of attention cartographers typically lavish on scrubby field-edge growth.

The name on those early maps is Skeaghvreedy Bush, though Robinson's 1977 map of the area gives the more explanatory alternative: St. Brigid's Bush. Holy bushes, usually whitethorn or hawthorn, are a recurring feature of the Irish landscape, traditionally associated with a local saint, a sacred spring, or a pattern day, the latter being a communal gathering at a holy site on a saint's feast day. This particular cluster was, according to Houlihan writing in 2016, a place where pilgrims gathered on Brigid's Day, the first of February, within living memory. That tradition has now stopped. The Recorded Monuments Programme listed the site in 1996 as a holy bush, with the cautious qualifier "possible", a small hedge against uncertainty that somehow makes the place feel more rather than less poignant. The maps, at least, seem to have had no such doubts; the bush was considered worth naming across editions separated by more than seventy years.