It looked, on paper, like something worth investigating. When someone finally went to look in 1992, the reality was more prosaic but no less telling: a hillock that had been quarried into from the east and northwest, its stone extracted and put to work nearby.

The likely purpose of that extraction was the limekiln that sits on the southern slope of the same hillock. Limekilns were once a fixture of the Irish rural landscape, simple stone structures used to burn limestone at high temperatures and produce quicklime, which farmers spread on fields to reduce soil acidity. The relationship between this quarry and its kiln is a small, self-contained piece of agricultural history: stone taken from one part of a hill, burned a short distance away, the resulting lime improving the same land the whole operation overlooked. Because the quarrying dates to after 1700, it falls outside the period that archaeological survey bodies typically cover, placing it in that particular no-man's-land between archaeology and local history where a great deal of ordinary rural life quietly resides.