Near the Awbeg River in Ballyroe, County Cork, a roughly circular area some 150 metres across was marked on the 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map with a broken boundary line, the kind of notation that can, at a glance, suggest an enclosure of potential archaeological interest. It was duly catalogued as a potential site in both the Sites and Monuments Record in 1988 and the Record of Monuments and Places in 1998, sitting quietly in those inventories for years.

In the end, the site turned out to be a gravel quarry, not a ringfort, enclosure, or any other monument from the human past. The broken line on the nineteenth-century map was simply describing the irregular edge of an extraction site, situated about 60 metres west of the Awbeg. It is a small reminder of how the process of archaeological survey works in practice: features are flagged from map evidence alone, noted as warranting further attention, and only later confirmed or ruled out. The SMR and RMP systems were designed precisely to cast a wide net, capturing ambiguous cartographic features so that nothing genuinely significant would be overlooked in the first pass. The gravel quarry at Ballyroe is, in that sense, a byproduct of thoroughness rather than a mistake.