On the Ordnance Survey six-inch map revised in 1947 and 1948, a hachured feature, the cartographic shorthand for a depression or earthwork, sits in the landscape with all the visual suggestion of something ancient and worth investigating. It was not until 1985 that someone actually went to look.

What they found was a gravel pit, post-medieval in origin and unremarkable by any measure except the mild curiosity of its misreading. Because the feature dates to after AD 1700, it falls outside the scope of formal archaeological classification, which in Ireland generally concerns itself with earlier remains. The pit was dug, presumably, for practical local use, gravel being a common material for road surfacing and land drainage, and it was abandoned at some point and left to grass over into the surrounding fields. The map revision captured its outline without resolving its nature, and for nearly four decades the hachures did what hachures occasionally do: they implied significance where there was simply a hole.