It was once mapped as an enclosure, the kind of designation that implies human settlement or boundary-making of some antiquity, yet the ground itself tells a rather more ambiguous story.

The first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map, surveyed in 1841, shows an oval area marked out by hachures along its southern arc. Hachures are short lines used by cartographers to indicate slopes or raised features, and their presence here suggested something with a defined, rounded edge rising from the surrounding land. That reading held unchallenged for well over a century. When the site was visited in 2000, however, what greeted the surveyor was not the coherent outline of a historic enclosure but a roughly rectangular patch of ground, approximately fifteen metres across in both directions, scattered with random humps and hollows. The conclusion drawn was that the feature is most probably a disused quarry, the irregular surface being the typical signature of extracted and discarded material rather than any deliberate architectural form.

What lingers is the gap between the map and the place. The 1841 cartographers recorded something oval and bounded; the land in 2000 offered something rectangular and chaotic. Whether the quarrying postdated the original survey and gradually consumed whatever had been there before, or whether the oval on the map was itself a misreading of extraction spoil, is not resolved. Tucked into a narrow strip of ground between the slope and the river to the north, the site sits in that uncomfortable category of places that have been looked at more than once and understood a little less each time.