The 1932 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map marked it with hachures, the short radiating lines cartographers use to suggest an earthwork or enclosure of potential significance. It looked, in other words, like something worth noting. When someone finally went out to look at it properly in 1983, the feature turned out to be an overgrown clay pit, post-1700 in date and thoroughly unremarkable by archaeological standards. The mystery, such as it was, dissolved on closer inspection.

Clay pits of this kind were working features of the rural Irish landscape for centuries, dug to extract material for building, for puddling field drains, or for daubing the walls of outbuildings. They tend to be small, undocumented, and easily mistaken for something older once vegetation takes over and the original edges soften. The fifty-odd years between the digging and the mapping at Lattoon was apparently enough for the pit to acquire a suitably ambiguous silhouette. Because its origins fall after AD 1700, it sits outside the scope of prehistoric and early historic survey work, occupying that unremarkable band of the past that is too recent for archaeology and too old to be remembered.