It looks modern, it was not recorded on the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1837, and yet it has been formally classified, twice, as a possible cairn, appearing in both the Sites and Monuments Record of 1989 and the Record of Monuments and Places of 1995. It is also logged simultaneously under two separate county records, once for Sligo and once for Leitrim, which is itself a small clue to its function.

This cairn is one of a series of eight such stone piles that trace the county boundary across the mountains between Sligo and Leitrim. Cairns used in this way, as boundary markers in upland or otherwise featureless terrain, have a long tradition in Ireland, though the age of any individual example can be difficult to establish. The absence of this one from the 1837 OS map does not necessarily mean it post-dates that survey; the early Ordnance Survey was thorough but not exhaustive, particularly in remote mountain terrain. What the series as a whole suggests is a deliberate, systematic effort to make an otherwise invisible administrative line legible on the ground, stacking stone on stone along a ridge where no wall or ditch would have been practical.