Three lie close together; a fourth sits about 165 metres to the south, as though it drifted away from the group. To a casual eye they read as minor dips in the ground, the kind of irregularity common in old farmland. What they actually represent is a cluster of disused sand pits, worked out and left to be slowly absorbed back into the field.

The pits came to attention not through excavation or local memory but through cartography. The 1926 revision of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded four small hachured features at this location, hachures being the short radiating lines surveyors used to indicate slope or depression on the ground surface. When the site was inspected in 1984, those markings turned out to correspond to the hollows of former sand extraction. The pits are thought to date from the nineteenth or early twentieth century, which would place their working lives within the period when small-scale local quarrying and pit-digging were routine parts of rural land management, supplying sand for building, drainage, or agricultural use on nearby holdings.