They appear on the 1947 to 1948 revision of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map as hachured features, the cartographic shorthand used to suggest hollow or irregular ground, which gave them enough of an ambiguous outline to warrant a closer look.

When that closer look came, during a field inspection in 1985, the features turned out to be disused quarries, almost certainly used for extracting stone for local building or road maintenance at some point after 1700. Small quarries of this kind were once commonplace across rural Ireland, opened informally on whatever patch of workable rock lay nearest to hand and abandoned just as quietly once the immediate need had passed. Because these particular quarries post-date AD 1700, they fall outside the scope of formal archaeological classification, which generally concerns itself with earlier material. That boundary places them in an odd administrative gap, old enough to have been forgotten, recent enough not to be protected.