It does not appear on the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1840, nor on the more detailed twenty-five-inch edition of 1897. The only cartographic acknowledgement it ever received was a modest annotation reading "Mound" on the later Cassini edition of the OSi six-inch map, a label so vague it could mean almost anything. By the time aerial imagery was captured between 2011 and 2013, no surface remains were visible at all.

The cairn sits on the boundary line between two townlands, Ballylopen and Ballyshanedehey, which is precisely the point. Boundary cairns, which are roughly piled accumulations of stone used to mark territorial or administrative limits, served a practical function in the landscape long before fences or hedgerows became the norm. This particular example is one of six cairns in the area, recorded across both Cork and Limerick under the Sites and Monuments Record references CO008-019/020 and LI055-022/023001/002. The group straddles the county boundary, suggesting the cairns were placed deliberately along a line of division that mattered to the people who lived and farmed here, though when exactly they were erected is not documented in the current record. The site was compiled by Fiona Rooney and uploaded to the national record in November 2021.

For anyone inclined to look, access to this part of Carron Mountain means negotiating the dense planting of a conifer plantation, the kind of terrain where undergrowth is suppressed but visibility is also low and the ground can be uneven beneath layers of fallen needles and root systems. The conifer canopy itself may be partly responsible for the absence of visible surface remains, as decades of forestry activity and root growth are not kind to low earthworks. The boundary between Ballylopen and Ballyshanedehey is the line to follow, and the cairn's position along it is the clearest guide available. Given that satellite imagery shows nothing at ground level, patience and a good map are more useful here than any expectation of a dramatic find.