On the 1932 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, it appears as a hachured marking, the cartographic shorthand for a depression or earthwork, which could suggest any number of things to anyone flicking through historical maps of County Galway. An ancient enclosure, perhaps, or a natural landform with some significance. When the site was inspected in 1983, the reality turned out to be considerably more prosaic: a disused sand or gravel pit, long abandoned, defined now only by the hollow it left behind.

There is something quietly instructive about this. The six-inch OS maps, produced across Ireland during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, were remarkable documents of the landscape, but they were not infallible interpreters of it. A hachured symbol recorded a shape in the ground; it could not record intent or origin. Pits dug for sand and gravel were common features of the rural Irish landscape, dug to supply material for road repair, building work, or drainage, and then left when the resource was exhausted or no longer needed. Without further context, a hollow is just a hollow, and it takes a physical visit, decades later in this case, to settle the matter.