What field inspectors actually found at Carrowblough More was rather more mundane, and arguably more interesting for that.

The site first appeared on the 1923 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map as a subcircular hachured area, the kind of marking surveyors used to indicate a depression or raised feature in the landscape. That cartographic notation was enough to earn it a formal listing as an earthwork in the Sites and Monuments Record in 1992 and again in the Record of Monuments and Places in 1996. When someone finally visited in 2003, they found a shallow, roughly oval hollow, no more than two metres deep, measuring about fifteen metres north to south and eighteen metres east to west. It had simply been quarried at some point, almost certainly as a source of stone or perhaps marl, a calcium-rich clay commonly dug from small pits across rural Ireland to improve acidic soils.

The gap between the map notation and the ground inspection, spanning eighty years of official misclassification, is a small reminder of how landscape features accumulate significance through paperwork rather than archaeology. A hachured blob on an old map, recopied into one record and then another, can quietly gather the weight of antiquity before anyone walks out to look at it.