Hachuring, the cartographer's shorthand for a depression or earthwork in the terrain, is the kind of symbol that tends to draw the attention of archaeologists, suggesting as it does something sunken, shaped, or otherwise altered by human hands across a long span of time. When someone eventually went to look in 1984, the feature turned out to be a disused sand or gravel pit, almost certainly dug sometime after 1700, and of no great antiquity at all.

There is something quietly telling about this small episode of fieldwork. The pit had sat on the map for decades, wearing the visual language of archaeological significance, before an inspection confirmed it was simply a working extraction site of the post-medieval period, the kind of pit that would have supplied local building and drainage projects with raw material as a matter of everyday rural practicality. Because it falls after the AD 1700 threshold that defines the scope of formal prehistoric and early historic survey work in Ireland, it sits in a kind of administrative no man's land, noted, visited, and then set aside.