Hachuring, the use of short radiating lines to suggest a depression or earthwork, is the cartographer's way of flagging something worth noting on the ground. For decades, that symbol carried the faint suggestion of an ancient feature, the kind of thing that draws archaeologists out into wet fields with notebooks and measuring tape.

When an inspection finally took place in 1985, the feature turned out to be a disused sand pit, worked at some point after 1700. That date matters because it places the pit firmly outside the period covered by archaeological survey work focused on earlier remains, and so the site passed quietly out of the official record of ancient monuments. It is a small story about a hole in the ground, but also about how landscape features accumulate ambiguity over time, how a working pit becomes a grassy hollow, and how a cartographic symbol can outlast the memory of what it once represented.