In the townland of Barrow in County Kerry, a midden, essentially a prehistoric rubbish heap of shells, bones, and discarded domestic debris that, over centuries, becomes one of the most informative archaeological deposits a site can yield, sits somewhere on the landscape, officially recognised but cartographically elusive. Its precise position, according to those who attempted to plot it, simply could not be determined from the map used to define the boundary of its legal protection.

On 28 February 1992, this midden was among seven such sites entered together onto the Register of Historic Monuments under Schedule 1/92, published in Iris Oifigiúil, the official gazette of the Irish state. Registration offers legal protection to monuments considered to be of significant archaeological interest, but the mapping work underpinning that process occasionally ran into practical difficulties. In this case, the boundary of the registration order was not sufficiently legible or precise to allow the midden to be assigned a definitive grid point, and so a temporary location was placed at the centre of the registered area as a kind of administrative placeholder. The monument is protected; where, exactly, it sits within that protected zone remains an open question.