This was not mere decoration. The offerings were ex votos, tokens of petition or gratitude tied to the branches by people seeking the intercession of a saint, a practice found at holy trees and wells across Ireland that blurs the boundary between pre-Christian custom and Catholic devotion. What drew them here was not the bush alone but what lay beneath it: a bullaun stone, a large boulder bearing one or more rounded cup-shaped depressions ground into its surface, whose waters were regarded as sacred or curative.

The Ordnance Survey Letters of 1839 record the stone under the name Glun Padraig, Patrick's Knee, suggesting a founding legend in which the saint knelt here and left his mark on the rock. Writing in 1876 to 1878, the historian Shearman described the old hawthorn overshadowing the stone and its branches hung with shreds torn from the garments of devotees. By 1905, the Reverend William Carrigan was recording the same scene in his history of the diocese of Ossory, noting that the people still held the bush in particular veneration and that its branches remained well supplied with cloth and linen offerings. Carrigan also preserved a tradition that a church and graveyard once stood adjacent to the bullaun stone and the tree, which, if accurate, would place this spot within a much older sacred landscape. The site lies roughly 300 metres south-east of a standing stone, suggesting the area accumulated layers of significance across a very long span of time.