At Ballinfoile in County Galway, a quarry pit was pinpointed not through fieldwork on the ground but by peering across at it from a neighbouring quarry. What had previously appeared on the 1945 to 1946 revision of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map as a hachured feature, the fine radiating lines surveyors used to indicate a depression or slope in the terrain, turned out, when observed from the right vantage point, to be a straightforward quarry pit.

The quarry dates to after 1700, which places it firmly in the post-medieval period and outside the scope of archaeological classification under Irish heritage survey criteria. That might sound like a bureaucratic footnote, but it points to something genuinely interesting about how the past gets sorted and catalogued. A Bronze Age pit or a medieval souterrain commands one kind of attention; a quarry dug sometime in the last three centuries occupies a different register entirely, even if the labour and local history embedded in it are no less real. Quarrying in this part of Connacht supplied stone for field walls, farmhouses, roads, and estate buildings across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and a pit like this one at Ballinfoile was likely part of that unremarkable but essential rural infrastructure.