According to local tradition recorded in the nineteenth century, a bell could be heard ringing from it every seven years. Nobody seems to have explained what the bell was, where it came from, or what it meant. The tradition simply existed, attached to a single tree among several growing along the boundary wall of Dooros burial ground, and that was apparently enough to fix a name to the place.

The name appears on the 1838 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, marked plainly as "Bell Tree". The OS Letters, a series of notebooks compiled by surveyors gathering local knowledge during that same period, record the explanation as the people themselves gave it: the name originated in the tradition of a bell heard ringing in the tree once every seven years. The compiler was careful to frame it as tradition rather than fact, but the care taken to record it suggests it was a genuine and persistent piece of local belief rather than a passing remark. The 1838 map shows four trees growing along the enclosing wall of the graveyard, but which of the four carried the name is no longer clear.

Two hawthorn trees still survive along the north-north-western stretch of the wall. The hawthorn, known in Irish folklore as a fairy tree and long associated with boundaries between the living and the dead, would be a fitting candidate, though whether either of the surviving trees is the one that mattered is impossible now to say.