In the undulating pastureland of Ballyglass in County Galway, a feature marked on an old Ordnance Survey map turned out to be exactly that, though the paper trail itself has a certain charm of its own.

The feature appeared as a hachured marking, a cartographic convention used to suggest a hollow or depression in the ground, on the 1947 to 1948 revision of the OS six-inch map. Such markings can indicate anything from a ringfort to a collapsed souterrain, so when the site was inspected in 1985, there was presumably some expectation of finding something older and more archaeologically significant. Instead, the depression in the field was a quarry, post-dating 1700 AD, and therefore outside the scope of archaeological classification. It was recorded, noted, and quietly set aside.