On the 1930 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map covering Carrownaseer in County Galway, two hachured areas, the cartographic shorthand for disturbed or excavated ground, were marked in a way that suggested something worth noting. When the site was actually visited in 1987, more than half a century after the map was drawn, those markings turned out to correspond to a pair of small sand or gravel pits, the kind of modest extraction works that once supplied local farms and roads with basic material and then quietly fell out of use.