When heritage surveyors first recorded it in 1992, they listed it as an earthwork, a broad classification that typically covers man-made banks, ditches, and enclosures. It remained under that label through the subsequent Record of Monuments and Places in 1996. The Ordnance Survey told a slightly different story: the 25-inch map named the feature a gravel pit, marked as disused, while even the earlier 6-inch edition from 1920 showed a small hachured mark at the same spot, those short radiating lines that cartographers use to suggest a hollow or slope.

When someone finally visited in 2018, the picture clarified considerably. What they found was a back-filled quarry, the original excavation long since filled in, sitting within a landscape of extensive outcropping rock. The surrounding ground is uneven, scattered with small depressions, which may help explain why the site was initially misread from a distance or from map evidence alone. The geology of the area, with rock breaking through the surface in multiple places, suggests the quarrying was opportunistic, taking advantage of material that was already close at hand rather than requiring deep extraction.