Cairns used in this way are essentially deliberate piles of stone, raised not as burial monuments but as landmarks, making an invisible administrative line legible on the ground. At least one of this group has never been relocated by modern survey teams, which puts it in a quietly odd category: a feature recorded on maps, assigned a reference number, given a place in the archaeological inventory, and yet, in practice, missing.

The cairns appear on the 1937 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, placed close to the top of Carron Mountain and distributed along the Cork-Limerick border. The practice of marking county or parish boundaries with cairns is an old one in Ireland, sometimes overlapping with much earlier prehistoric mounding traditions, though in cases like this the stones were almost certainly raised or maintained for administrative rather than funerary purposes. Whether the cairns shown on the 1937 survey were already old at the time of mapping, or were relatively recent boundary markers, the notes do not say. What is clear is that five related features were recorded together in the same area, and that at least this one proved impossible to pin down on the ground when investigators came looking.