In the flat pastureland of Cloonigny in County Galway, there is a site that appears on mid-twentieth century maps but had entirely vanished from the ground by the time anyone thought to look closely at it.

The Ordnance Survey six-inch map, revised in 1948, marks a hachured feature at this location. Hachuring on OS maps of this period typically indicated a depression or earthwork of some kind, and cartographic evidence points to this one having been a sand or gravel pit, the sort of small-scale extraction hollow that was once common across Ireland wherever road-making or building materials were needed locally. When the site was inspected in 1985, no visible surface trace of it remained. A house had been built directly on the spot, quietly erasing whatever shallow topography had once been there.