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THE RITUAL ATMOSPHERICS of Christmas trees, holly and sprigs of imported mistletoe have little connection left with any pagan faith in surviving the winter, much as we could do with that just now. But last summer’s fancy of the Virgin Mary’s figure in a tree stump spoke for Ireland’s still-potent subculture of magical belief.

The Co Limerick illusion came too late for Trees of Inspiration: Sacred Trees & Bushes of Ireland(Collins Press, €24.95), but a photograph of Rathkeale’s existing holy well, beneath an ash tree decked with rosaries and studded with coins, is one of scores of such local arboreal shrines entwined with elderly trunks and branches. They take their place with trees enduring as memorials of great events, mythical, military, social and political.