It was a leacht cuimhne, a form of commemorative monument, modest in scale but carrying a name and a date. The inscription recorded Loughlin Kelly and his wife, and was dated 1646. Nobody ever transcribed the text in full, and then, sometime in the 1940s, the cairn was destroyed during quarrying. What had survived three centuries of weather and neglect was gone within a decade of being formally noticed.

The cairn was described in the Ordnance Survey Letters compiled by John O'Flanagan in 1927, which documented local monuments and placename lore as part of the great nineteenth-century mapping project; O'Flanagan's volumes remain a valuable, if sometimes uneven, record of features that have since vanished. By the time the monument was referenced again by Claffey in 1983, the cairn existed only in those earlier written accounts. The beehive shape he describes, a roughly domed mound of stones, was a form used for both prehistoric burial markers and later commemorative structures, though in this case the 1646 date places it firmly in the early modern period, a generation that lived through the upheavals of the 1640s in Ireland. That a husband and wife were memorialised together at a roadside junction suggests the marker served a community function, a place where travellers would pass and, presumably, pause.