Hachures, the short radiating lines cartographers use to indicate slopes or hollow ground, marked these features as something worth noting, spread across an area of roughly 855 metres north-northeast to south-southwest and about 600 metres west-northwest to east-southeast, straddling a road running in roughly the same north-south orientation.

When someone went out to inspect them in 1984, the features turned out to be a scatter of pits, depressions, and quarries, three lying to the east of the road and four to its west. Their origin is post-1700, which places them firmly in the era of organised agricultural improvement, estate management, and small-scale industrial extraction that reshaped much of the Irish landscape during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Quarrying in this period often served intensely local purposes: extracting limestone for field drainage or for burning in lime kilns to produce fertiliser, or simply clearing ground. The spread of these workings across such a wide area suggests sustained, if modest, activity rather than a single episode of digging.