On the 1944 to 1945 revision of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, the feature appears marked with hachures, the small radiating lines surveyors used to indicate a depression or earthwork of some kind. Without further investigation, such a mark might suggest an ancient enclosure, a rath, or some other archaeological remnant. When the site was inspected in 1984, the answer turned out to be considerably more prosaic: a disused quarry, now grassed over and quietly returning to the landscape around it.

The gap between the map revision and the on-the-ground inspection spans nearly forty years, which is itself a small illustration of how landscape features accumulate ambiguity over time. A working quarry, once its stone was exhausted and its activity ceased, would have been left to weather and grow over, eventually presenting to a later eye as nothing more obvious than an uneven hollow in a field. The Ordnance Survey mapping of the mid-twentieth century captured it in that intermediate state, legible as something but not immediately identifiable as what.