Hachures on OS maps of this period were used to indicate slope or irregular terrain, and something about this particular feature was curious enough to warrant a closer look. When someone finally went to inspect it in 1984, nearly four decades after it was mapped, the mark turned out to indicate an overgrown disused quarry, its edges softened by decades of vegetation, its original purpose long since spent.

Because the quarry dates to after AD 1700, it falls outside the scope of archaeological protection, which in Ireland generally concerns itself with features from earlier periods. That boundary says something quietly interesting about how heritage is categorised: a working quarry from the eighteenth or nineteenth century, once a source of local stone for building or road-making, can become so thoroughly absorbed back into the landscape that it registers only as an anomaly on a mid-twentieth-century map, waiting almost forty years to be correctly identified. The name Abbeyland Little itself hints at older ecclesiastical landholding in the area, though the quarry's own story is a more workaday one, belonging to the period when demand for cut or broken stone was at its most practical and immediate.