Originally recorded at Ballyarkane Oughter in County Kerry, it long ago left the townland where it was first documented and has since passed through a succession of addresses, none of them its original home.

At some point in the 1800s the trough was moved to Anglont House in Killorglin, where the Foley family had lived for several generations. The object settled there long enough to be assigned its own heritage record number, an administrative curiosity that hints at how thoroughly it had been separated from its origins. When the Foley family relocated in the 1990s to a different house in the south of Anglont townland, near what had been the Liebig factory, the trough went with them. An inspection in 2000 confirmed it was still at that address. By 2005, local information suggested it had moved again, this time to a garden somewhere in the Summerhill area of Killorglin, though its precise location at that point was unknown. The two separate heritage record numbers assigned to the trough over the years have since been linked back to each other, reconnecting the object, at least on paper, to its original record at Ballyarkane Oughter and the neighbouring townland of Beheenagh.

What makes the cistern quietly compelling is less what it is than what has happened to it: a functional stone vessel, cut from local conglomerate, that has been carried from townland to townland across more than a century, accumulating addresses while its original context recedes. It is the kind of object that formal heritage records struggle to keep pace with, and the honest admission buried in the 2005 note, that its precise location is simply not known, gives the whole account an unresolved quality that no amount of cross-referencing has entirely resolved.