Hachuring, the cartographer's shorthand for depicting slopes or depressions, can signal all manner of things: earthworks, field banks, the eroded shoulders of ancient monuments. This particular cluster turned out, when someone finally went to look in 1985, to be a series of disused quarry pits, long since grassed over and folded back into the ordinary agricultural landscape.

The gap between the map and the inspection is itself quietly telling. For roughly four decades, the feature sat unexamined, carrying just enough ambiguity on paper to suggest it might be something older. Quarrying of this kind, dated to after 1700, was commonplace in rural Ireland, where local stone was extracted for field walls, road foundations, and building work with no great ceremony and no expectation of being remembered. These pits would have been practical, seasonal, and entirely unremarkable to the people who worked them. What lingers is the small irony that the site is too recent to fall within the scope of formal archaeological recording, sitting just on the modern side of the threshold that separates the surveyed past from everything else.