At Knockauns in County Galway, a circular hachured feature, the cartographic shorthand for a depression or hollow, appears on the 1930 edition of the OS six-inch map. The same spot is labelled 'Gravel Pit (Disused)' on the larger-scale 25-inch plan, suggesting that by the time surveyors recorded it, the digging had already stopped and the land had been left to settle around the wound it contained.

When the site was inspected in 1984, what the maps had suggested as a simple pit proved to be something slightly more layered: a deep pit set within a broader hollow, the outer depression possibly the result of earlier extraction or the gradual slumping of ground around the original workings. Gravel pits of this kind were common features of the Irish rural landscape from the nineteenth century onward, dug to supply road-making and construction material at a local level, often by estate workers or county road gangs. The Knockauns example is thought to date from the nineteenth or early twentieth century, placing it within that period of incremental rural infrastructure improvement that followed the upheavals of the Famine decades.