On the 1931 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, the site appears marked with hachures, the short radiating lines cartographers use to suggest a depression or earthwork in the terrain, the kind of notation that can make a gravel pit look, at a glance, like something considerably older or more significant.

When the site was inspected in 1984, the feature turned out to be a disused gravel pit, most likely dug sometime during the nineteenth or early twentieth century. Gravel extraction of this kind was common across rural Ireland during that period, when local pits supplied the material for road-making and maintenance, farm tracks, and drainage works. The pit at Cloonshivna is defined now simply by its hollow, the scooped-out absence where the gravel once was, with no surviving structures or visible working apparatus to indicate its former purpose.