In low-lying pastureland at Curraghrevagh in County Galway, a hachured marking on the 1931 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, those short radiating lines surveyors used to indicate a depression or raised feature in the terrain, drew enough attention to warrant a physical inspection more than fifty years after the map was drawn. What investigators found in 1984 was modest: a shallow hollow in the ground, the remnant of a disused gravel pit, most likely worked at some point during the nineteenth or early twentieth century.

There is something quietly telling about the gap between cartographic notation and ground-level reality. The OS six-inch series, produced across Ireland from the 1830s onwards, was extraordinarily thorough, and its later editions continued to record landscape features that had already fallen out of use. A gravel pit of this kind would have served a practical, local purpose, supplying loose aggregate for road-making or land drainage, work that was unremarkable at the time and left little documentary trace. By the time someone walked out to check the Curraghrevagh marking in 1984, the pit had long since been absorbed back into the surrounding farmland, its outline softened to a hollow in the grass.