Two small depressions in the pastureland of Derrymore, County Galway, appeared on the 1932 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map as hachured markings, the kind of cartographic shorthand that typically signals earthworks of potential antiquity. To anyone scanning that sheet, they might have suggested ring features, burial mounds, or some other trace of earlier habitation in the undulating ground between the pasture and the bogland that stretches away to the south.

When the features were inspected on the ground in 1984, the reality turned out to be considerably more mundane. The two pits, one of them with a companion feature located roughly 27 metres to the north-east, were identified as almost certainly disused sand pits, dug at some point after 1700. That dating placed them firmly outside the scope of formal archaeological consideration, which in Ireland generally concerns itself with features predating that threshold. The bogs and rough grazing of this part of Connacht were worked and modified by local communities across the post-medieval centuries in ways that rarely left grand monuments, only quiet scars in the land like these: practical extractions of sand for construction, drainage, or agriculture, long since abandoned and slowly grassing over.