Latoon Fairy Bush

In 1999, during the construction of the M18 motorway through County Clare, a solitary whitethorn bush stood directly in the path of the planned road. Whitethorn — the hawthorn — is one of the most protected trees in Irish tradition: a fairy tree, a meeting place for the sídhe, not to be cut or disturbed without consequences that could range from bad luck to catastrophe.

The folklorist and storyteller Eddie Lenihan launched a public campaign to have the road realigned. He argued that the Latoon bush was not merely a local superstition but a significant node in the fairy geography of Munster — a meeting place for supernatural forces that had been there long before the road was dreamed of. The campaign drew national and international attention, and Clare County Council rerouted the motorway to spare the tree.

The Latoon bush still stands beside the M18, on a small island of preserved ground amid the carriageways. It has become one of the most visited examples of living fairy belief in modern Ireland — a demonstration that the older world of fairy trees, fairy paths, and the obligations they impose on the living has not entirely given way to the concrete and the cadastral map.