Others slip in quietly, accumulating official designations over decades before anyone pauses to ask whether they belong there at all. A quarry at Clykeel in County Cork falls into the second category, and its story is largely one of bureaucratic uncertainty rather than buried antiquity.

The site appeared as a listed quarry in the Sites and Monuments Record of 1988 and again in the Record of Monuments and Places a decade later in 1998, two successive attempts by Irish authorities to catalogue features of potential archaeological significance across the country. The problem is that when surveyors consulted the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842, one of the most reliable early documentary sources for features present in the Irish landscape at that time, the quarry does not appear at all. Its absence from that map, combined with a lack of other supporting evidence, led to the conclusion that there is insufficient basis to accept this as the location of an archaeological monument. In other words, the quarry was flagged, scrutinised, and quietly set aside.