In the undulating pastureland of Derryfrench in County Galway, a hachured marking on the 1920 edition of the OS six-inch map drew enough curiosity to warrant a visit. When someone finally looked, in 1983, what they found was a disused gravel pit, its presence reduced to a shallow hollow in the grass.

Hachures, the short radiating lines used on older maps to suggest slopes or depressions, can make even modest earthworks look significant on paper. In this case the feature turned out to be a working remnant of post-1700 land use, the kind of small extractive pit that would have supplied local road-making or building work before the era of industrial quarrying. Because its origins fall after AD 1700, it sits outside the chronological scope of archaeological protection in Ireland, which generally concerns itself with earlier periods. The pit was noted, assessed, and effectively set aside, its brief moment of scrutiny leaving behind little more than a record of what it was not.