It measured roughly twenty metres on its north-northwest to south-southeast axis and about eleven metres across. When someone finally went to look at it in person in 1984, the feature turned out to be a disused sand pit, by then reduced to little more than a hollow in the ground. There is something quietly revealing about that gap: a mark on a map, unexamined for over half a century, waiting to be identified as something entirely ordinary.

Sand pits of this kind were common features of the Irish rural landscape in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, dug to supply local needs for sand used in mortar, drainage work, or road maintenance. They rarely left substantial traces, and once extraction stopped, the sides would slump and the hollow gradually soften into the surrounding pasture. This one is thought to date from the nineteenth or early twentieth century, which would place its working life somewhere in the period of intensive small-scale land improvement and estate management that shaped much of rural Connacht. Its appearance on the 1931 Ordnance Survey map suggests it was still a recognisable feature of the landscape at that point, even if no longer in active use.