In Carrow, Co. Clare, a small gravel pit once left enough of a mark on the landscape to be picked up by Ordnance Survey cartographers and later entered into the official record of protected monuments, only for an inspection in 2002 to find no physical trace of it whatsoever.

The story, such as it is, can be read across two generations of mapping. On the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1922, the feature appears as an arc of hachures, those short hatched lines surveyors used to indicate a slope or depression, stretching roughly 45 metres in length. The earlier OS 25-inch map had already named it plainly: Gravel Pit, Disused. By 1992, when it was entered into the Sites and Monuments Record, it had been classified as an earthwork, a broad category that covers any human-made shaping of the ground. By 1996 it had made it into the Record of Monuments and Places, the statutory list that gives certain sites legal protection. Then, six years later, someone went to look at it and found nothing there at all. The ground had moved on, absorbed by agriculture or development or simply by time working on loose gravel without any stonework to anchor it.