What makes them worth pausing over is the gap between what they appear to be on paper and what they turned out to be on the ground. On the 1926 revision of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, both sites are marked with hachures, the short radiating lines cartographers traditionally used to indicate an escarpment or a dramatic change in ground level. That notation carries a certain weight, suggesting something more deliberate or prominent than a couple of grassy dips in a field.

When the sites were inspected in 1984, the reality proved rather more modest. The hachured markings corresponded to two disused gravel pits, their original edges softened over time into gentle hollows. Gravel extraction of this kind was common across rural Ireland during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, typically carried out to supply local road-making or farm drainage rather than any large-scale industrial operation. The pits at Cartron are thought to date from that same broad period. There are no dramatic cuttings here, no surviving machinery or infrastructure; just the faint impression left in the land by work that was practical, localised, and long finished.