What makes it mildly curious is the journey it took to be identified as nothing in particular. On the 1932 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, the spot was marked with hachures, the short radiating lines cartographers use to indicate a depression or earthwork in the landscape. To anyone reading that map, it might have suggested something older and more significant beneath the Galway soil.

When someone went out to look in 1983, the feature turned out to be a shallow hollow, most likely the remains of a disused sand or gravel pit. Small extractive pits of this kind were once common across rural Ireland, dug to supply local building work or road maintenance, and then quietly abandoned when they were no longer needed. Because the pit dates to after AD 1700, it falls outside the scope of archaeological protection, which generally concerns itself with earlier remains. The 1932 map, in other words, had preserved a memory of industrial ordinariness, a working hollow that had already been forgotten by the time cartographers thought to record it.