By the time anyone formally inspected it, in 1984, the pit was already well on its way to being swallowed by vegetation, its original purpose readable only through the cartographic record it left behind.

The feature appears on the 1930 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map as a hachured depression, those short radiating lines surveyors used to suggest a hollow or earthwork, and is identified on the larger twenty-five-inch plan simply as "Gravel Pit (Disused)". Gravel extraction of this kind was common throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when road building and local construction created a steady demand for aggregate that could be won from small, opportunistic workings rather than industrial quarries. The pit at Pollaneyster is thought to date from that same general period, its working life almost certainly brief and its abandonment unremarkable enough that it left no documentary trace beyond a mark on a map.