The feature appeared on the 1932 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map as a hachured marking, the cartographic convention used to indicate a depression or slope in the terrain. When someone finally went to look at it in person, in 1984, they found a depression roughly forty metres across from east to west, thirty metres from north to south, and less than a metre deep. The most likely explanation is that it was once a sand and gravel pit, dug out at some point after 1700 and long since abandoned.

What makes the site quietly interesting is less what it is than what it illustrates about the landscape record. A working pit, probably dug for local road-building or construction fill, gets marked on a map, the map is consulted half a century later, and an inspection follows. The conclusion, when it came, was anticlimactic in the best possible way: this is post-medieval, probably industrial in the most modest rural sense, and too recent to fall within the scope of archaeological classification. It is, in other words, a hole that people dug, used, and forgot about, which is precisely the kind of thing that tends to vanish from the historical record entirely.