On the 1920 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, a hachured feature sits in the rolling pastureland near Aille in County Galway. Hachuring, the system of short radiating lines used by cartographers to suggest a depression or earthwork, can signal all manner of things: a ringfort, a souterrain entrance, a collapsed structure of genuine antiquity. When someone finally walked out to inspect this particular marking in 1983, they found a quarry pit.

The pit dates to after 1700, which places it firmly in the post-medieval period and outside the scope of bodies concerned with prehistoric and early historic monuments. That boundary, AD 1700, is a practical one used to distinguish the deep archaeological record from the more recent material landscape, and this site falls just on the wrong side of it for those purposes. What the quarry was extracting, who worked it, and how long it remained in use are details the surviving record does not supply. It sits in its field, noted and then set aside, a small industrial scar that the pastureland has long since grown around.