Hachuring on maps of that period typically indicated a hollow or depression in the ground, and for decades the feature was little more than a cartographic curiosity. When someone finally went to look in 1984, they found a disused quarry pit, still sitting in the grass where it had always been.

Associated with the pit is a limekiln, which gives some sense of what the quarry was once for. Limekilns were stone-built structures used to burn limestone at high temperatures, producing quicklime that could then be spread on fields to reduce soil acidity or used as a binding agent in mortar. The pairing of a quarry pit with a limekiln is common across the Irish countryside from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when improving landlords invested heavily in agricultural infrastructure. The Castle Ffrench estate, like many of its kind in Connacht, would have had practical reasons to extract and process local stone. Because the pit dates to after 1700, it falls outside the scope of archaeological classification, which tends to focus on earlier remains, and so it occupies an odd liminal space, too recent to be ancient, too forgotten to be remembered as industrial heritage.