On the 1931 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, it appears as a hachured feature, the cartographic shorthand used to indicate a depression or earthwork, which gave it an air of potential archaeological significance. When the site was inspected in 1984, the reality turned out to be more prosaic but quietly interesting in its own way: not an ancient earthwork at all, but the remnant of a gravel extraction pit, probably worked at some point during the nineteenth or early twentieth century.

Gravel pits of this kind were once common across rural Ireland, dug to supply the road-making and drainage work that transformed agricultural land during and after the nineteenth century. They rarely attracted much attention at the time and attract even less now, gradually softening back into the landscape until all that remains is the faint dip that caught a mapmaker's eye nearly a century ago. The gap between what the 1931 map suggested and what was actually found in 1984 is itself a small lesson in how landscape features accumulate ambiguity over time, sitting unexamined between one interpretation and another until someone finally walks the ground.