On the 1933 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, the feature appeared as a hachured marking, the cartographic convention used to suggest a hollow or earthwork of some kind, which left open the question of what exactly lay beneath that notation.

When the site was inspected in 1990, the mystery resolved itself in the most mundane possible way: it was a disused quarry pit, almost certainly worked at some point after 1700. That date matters administratively, since it places the feature outside the scope of formal archaeological classification, which generally concerns itself with earlier remains. The quarry would have supplied local stone for building, walling, or road-making, the kind of small-scale extraction that once appeared in almost every townland across rural Ireland and left behind little more than a scrape in the earth and a faint mark on an old map.