That description is accurate enough, but it undersells what the cairn actually represents: a deliberate act of cartographic marking, raised not by farmers clearing fields or by ancient communities burying their dead, but by surveyors fixing a county boundary on the landscape.

Around the time the Ordnance Survey was producing its detailed maps of Ireland, a small number of cairns and mounds were erected in this part of the country to serve as physical markers where the boundary between Leitrim and Cavan crossed open or otherwise featureless ground. Roughly six such markers were raised in this area, and very few survive. The cairn at Drumnafinnila Barr is one of the remaining examples, which makes it an unusual survivor of a pragmatic, largely forgotten surveying practice. It appears on no earlier mapping, suggesting it was constructed specifically for the purpose of boundary demarcation rather than appropriated from an older structure already in the ground.