Hachures, the short radiating lines cartographers use to suggest a depression or slope, implied something worth noting, some hollow or earthwork in an otherwise unremarkable stretch of agricultural ground. When someone finally went to look in 1984, the feature turned out to be a disused sand pit, identifiable now only as a hollow in the landscape.

The pit is thought to date from the nineteenth or early twentieth century, a period when local extraction of sand and gravel was a routine part of rural life, used for building, drainage, and road maintenance. Such workings were rarely documented in any formal way; they appear and disappear from maps almost incidentally, recorded not because they were considered significant but because they altered the surface enough to register. The gap between the 1926 mapping and the 1984 inspection is itself a small detail worth sitting with: sixty years during which the feature waited, labelled but unexamined, in the archive of Irish cartography.