On the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, it was marked as a sand or gravel pit, the kind of modest extraction site that supplied local building and road-making needs across rural Ireland during the nineteenth century. By the time of the 1898 to 1899 resurvey, the feature was rendered as a hachured outline, a cartographic shorthand used to indicate a depression or earthwork in the ground, suggesting the pit had by then taken on enough physical presence to register as a landform rather than simply an active working.