It was recorded as a quarry in 1988 and again in 1998, logged and catalogued and assigned its place in the ledger of notable ground features. Then, at some point, someone took a closer look and concluded that the evidence simply did not hold up. Not a quarry, not definitively. Not an archaeological monument either, at least not one that could be confirmed with any confidence. It sits in that uncomfortable administrative no-man's-land between "something" and "we are not sure what".

This kind of uncertainty is more common in the Irish archaeological record than it might seem. Features get noticed in the landscape, noted down, and classified under whatever category fits best at the time. Aerial photographs, old maps, and field inspections do not always agree, and what looks like deliberate human shaping of stone or earth from one angle can look entirely natural from another. A quarry, in the working sense, would represent organised extraction of stone or other material, leaving behind characteristic scarring, spoil heaps, and sometimes the ghosts of trackways. Whether any of those indicators exist at Ballyrusheen is, apparently, not clear enough to say.