On the 1944 to 1945 revision of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, the feature was recorded using hachures, the short radiating lines that cartographers traditionally used to suggest a raised or sunken earthwork. To anyone scanning that map, it would have looked like something worth investigating, perhaps a remnant of early settlement or land use stretching back centuries.

When the site was inspected on the ground in 1984, the reality turned out to be more modest: a small depression, most likely the remains of a disused sand or gravel pit, probably dug sometime after 1700. Such pits were common across rural Ireland, excavated to extract material for road maintenance, building work, or improving field drainage. Because the feature dates to the post-medieval period, it falls outside the scope of archaeological classification, which generally concerns itself with remains predating the eighteenth century. What the Craughwell hollow illustrates, almost incidentally, is the gap that can open between how a landscape feature appears on a historical map and what fieldwork actually finds. The hachured symbol carried an implied antiquity that the depression itself could not support.