On the rough upland pasture of Carrignabinnia Mountain in County Limerick, a boundary cairn once marked the line between the townlands of Baunteen and Carrigeen Mountain. A boundary cairn is, in its simplest form, a deliberate pile of stones used to signal a territorial or administrative division on the ground, a physical full stop in a landscape that might otherwise offer no obvious landmarks. Two related cairns still sit nearby, one roughly 50 metres to the north-east and another about 70 metres to the east, suggesting that this stretch of mountain carried a whole sequence of markers, each one reinforcing where one piece of land ended and another began.

The documentary record of this particular cairn is a study in gradual disappearance. The Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1840, one of the most thorough cartographic surveys Ireland had seen up to that point, makes no mention of it at all. By 1897, the twenty-five-inch edition had at least noticed something, annotating the spot as a 'Mound', a word that carries geological vagueness and tells us little about what surveyors thought they were recording. A later Cassini edition of the six-inch map went slightly further, depicting a small circular mound at the location. Then, when satellite imagery taken between 2011 and 2013 was examined, along with more recent Google Earth orthoimages, no surface remains were visible at all. Whether the cairn was robbed for field walls, subsumed into the surrounding pasture, or simply eroded away over time is not recorded.

For anyone wanting to seek it out, the site sits in rough upland terrain where access requires care and appropriate footwear. The two surviving neighbouring cairns, recorded under the identifiers LI050-023002- and LI050-023003-, lie close enough that they serve as useful points of reference when trying to orient yourself on the ground. Bear in mind that the primary cairn itself may leave nothing visible underfoot; what you are really looking for is a place, not a structure, a gap in the record that happens to sit on a townland boundary on a County Limerick hillside.