For generations, locals carried a chip of its wood when travelling, in the belief that it would protect them from drowning. Emigrants leaving Ireland, very likely in the decades following the Famine, took fragments with them as they departed, whittling it down until, by the late nineteenth century, one observer recorded that the tree had effectively disappeared piece by piece.

When the antiquary John Windele visited in 1847, he described a tree that was still very much alive, calling it beautiful, immensely large, and sacred to St Cranit, or St Craunat, a local saint associated with this part of Cork. The tree had its own acoustic legend: a bell was said to ring about midnight when the wind blew through its branches. That detail took on a stranger cast in 1834, when a storm partially destroyed the tree and a bell was found embedded within the trunk, possibly belonging to the nearby church whose ruins stood close by. Writing in the early twentieth century, the local historian J.H. Grove White noted that crowds of parishioners would come on St Craunat's day to pray at the old tree, before completing their rounds at the holy well at Ballingurrane, some distance away. The pilgrimage connected the two sites as part of a single act of devotion. Grove White also suggested that what visitors might find in his day was not the original tree at all, but a second one that had grown up from off-shoots of the first, the original having been steadily consumed by those who needed its protection on their journeys.