In the low-lying meadowland of Hermitage, County Galway, a feature marked on the 1926 revision of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map caught the eye of anyone who knew how to read such things: a hachured area, the cartographic shorthand for a depression or earthwork, suggesting something worth a second look. When someone finally took that second look, in 1984, they found a large, overgrown pit that local memory had always known simply as a sand pit.

The gap between the map's ambiguity and the reality on the ground is a small lesson in how landscape features accrue significance before they are properly examined. Hachuring on an OS map can indicate anything from an ancient earthwork to a quarry hollow, and the 1926 revision was working from a patchwork of older surveys and local knowledge. Because the pit dates to after AD 1700, it falls outside the scope of archaeological classification, which in Ireland generally concerns itself with features from earlier periods. In other words, it is not old enough to be ancient, and too ordinary to be remarkable. It remains in the meadow at Hermitage, overgrown and unclassified, a feature that was noticed, investigated, and then quietly set aside.