They themselves and the Fianna were playing the match through the length of three days and three nights, from Leamhain to the valley of the Fleisg, that is called the Crooked Valley of the Fianna, and neither of them winning a goal.  And when the Tuatha de Danaan that were watching the game on each side of Leamhain saw it was so hard for their hurlers to win a goal against the Fianna, they thought it as well to go away again without playing out the game.

Now the provision the Men of Dea had brought with them from the Land of Promise was crimson nuts, and apples, and sweet-smelling rowan berries.  And as they were passing through the district of Ui Fiachrach by the Muaidh, a berry of the rowan berries fell from them, and a tree grew up from it.  And there was virtue in its berries, and no sickness or disease would ever come on any person that would eat them, and those that would eat them would feel the liveliness of wine and the satisfaction of mead in them, and any old person of a hundred years that would eat them would go back to be young again, and any young girl that would eat them would grow to be a flower of beauty.

And it happened one time after the tree was grown, there were messengers of the Tuatha de Danaan going through the wood of Dubhros.  And they heard a great noise of birds and of bees, and they went where the noise was, and they saw the beautiful Druid tree.  They went back then and told what they had seen, and all the chief men of the Tuatha de Danaan when they heard it knew the tree must have grown from a berry of the Land of the Ever-Living Living Ones.  And they enquired among all their people, till they knew it was a young man of them, that was a musician, had dropped the berry.

And it is what they agreed, to send him in search of a man of Lochlann that would guard the tree by day and sleep in it by night.  And the women of the Sidhe were very downhearted to see him going from them, for there was no harper could play half so sweetly on his harp as he could play on an ivy leaf.

He went on then till he came to Lochlann, and he sat down on a bank and sleep came on him.  And he slept till the rising of the sun on the morrow; and when he awoke he saw a very big man coming towards him, that asked him who was he.  “I am a messenger from the Men of Dea,” he said; “and I am come looking for some very strong man that would be willing to guard a Druid tree that is in the wood of Dubhros.  And here are some of the berries he will be eating from morning to night,” he said.

And when the big man had tasted the berries, he said:  “I will go and guard all the trees of the wood to get those berries.”

And his name was the Searbhan Lochlannach, the Surly One of Lochlann.  Very black and ugly he was, having crooked teeth, and one eye only in the middle of his forehead.  And he had a thick collar of iron around his body, and it was in the prophecy that he would never die till there would be three strokes of the iron club he had, struck upon himself.  And he slept in the tree by night and stopped near it in the daytime, and he made a wilderness of the whole district about him, and none of the Fianna dared go hunt there because of the dread of him that was on them.