At Ballydoogan in County Galway, a hachured symbol on the 1933 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, those short radiating lines surveyors used to suggest a depression or earthwork, sat without a firm identification for fifty years before anyone went to look at it properly.

When the site was inspected in 1983, it turned out to be a quarry. The finding was straightforward enough, but it carried a particular administrative consequence: because the quarry dates to after AD 1700, it falls outside the scope of archaeological survey, which in Ireland generally concerns itself with earlier remains. That boundary matters more than it might seem. Quarrying was essential to post-medieval rural life across Connacht, supplying stone for field walls, farmhouses, lime kilns, and road surfaces, yet sites like this one tend to slip between the categories that formal record-keeping uses. Too recent to be archaeology, too modest to attract architectural or industrial heritage attention, they accumulate quietly in the landscape.