What the Ordnance Survey had dutifully recorded on its six-inch map of 1930 as a hachured area, and later labelled on the twenty-five-inch plan as a disused quarry, turned out on inspection in 1984 to be a large, roughly oval-shaped depression with water pooling at its base. The working face, the spoil heaps, the noise and industry of extraction had all long since yielded to stillness and water.

The site is thought to date from the nineteenth or early twentieth century, a period when small local quarries were a common feature of the Irish rural landscape, typically opened to supply stone for roads, field walls, or nearby construction and then abandoned once the immediate need passed or the workable material ran out. The Ordnance Survey maps, produced with methodical care across successive editions, preserved the memory of such places long after they had ceased to function, their hachure markings, short radiating lines used to indicate a slope or depression in the terrain, often the only surviving record of what had once been a working site. At Pollshask, even that cartographic trace had softened into something more ambiguous by the time a physical inspection was carried out more than half a century after the map was drawn.