It is, in a sense, a monument to its own disappearance, known today only because a cartographer thought it worth recording more than two centuries ago.

William Larkin's 1808 map of County Westmeath, held in the National Library of Ireland, marks this spot as an earthwork, a broad category that covers everything from ancient enclosures and burial mounds to later field boundaries and defensive banks. Whatever the feature was, nothing of it survives at surface level. What aerial photography has since revealed, however, is a crop-mark to the south-south-west of the mapped location, the kind of subtle discolouration in growing vegetation that can betray buried or disturbed ground beneath. This particular mark corresponds to a quarry hole dating to after 1700, and it may well be the very feature Larkin recorded. If so, what was noted as an earthwork in the early nineteenth century was possibly already a post-medieval quarry by then, its original character, if it ever had one, long since obscured by extraction work.