Hachures, the short radiating lines cartographers used to indicate slopes or depressions, gave the feature an air of significance, the kind of notation that might suggest an earthwork, a collapsed structure, or something older beneath the grass. When someone finally went to look in 1984, what they found was considerably more ordinary: a disused gravel pit, roughly thirty metres across and two metres deep, long since swallowed by trees and bushes.

The pit is thought to date from the nineteenth or twentieth century, the sort of small extractive hollow that once appeared quietly across rural Ireland wherever a landowner or road crew needed readily available gravel. Such pits were rarely documented at the time of their use and tend to survive only as soft depressions in fields, noticed more by cattle picking their way around them than by anyone else. The gap between the map edition of 1932 and the ground inspection of 1984 is itself a small curiosity, a half-century during which the hollow slowly filled with vegetation while the cartographic symbol that marked it remained open to interpretation.