On the 1920 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, a hachured marking, the series of short radiating lines surveyors used to indicate a depression or earthwork, sat quietly on the landscape, inviting speculation about what, exactly, it represented. When someone finally went to look in 1983, the answer turned out to be straightforward: a disused quarry, long since abandoned and reclaimed by the pasture around it.

The quarry post-dates 1700, which places it in the era of intensified land use and building activity that followed the upheavals of the seventeenth century. Small local quarries of this kind were once commonplace across rural Ireland, cut into hillsides to extract stone for field walls, farmhouses, and estate improvements. They tended to be worked for a generation or two and then left when the immediate need passed or a better source was found, gradually softening into the ground until only a hollow in the grass suggested anything had ever been taken from there. This one survived long enough to be caught by the Ordnance Survey mapmakers, though the map itself could not say what the feature was, only that something interrupted the otherwise even slope of the hill.