Hachures, the short radiating lines cartographers used to indicate slope or depression, mark these out as something worth noting on the landscape, yet what they represent is quietly mundane: a scatter of disused gravel pits, each defined simply by a hollow in the ground.

When the site was inspected in 1884, the pits were already out of use, suggesting they belong to the working landscape of the nineteenth or early twentieth century. Gravel extraction of this kind was common across rural Ireland during that period, supplying material for road surfacing and local construction at a time when infrastructure was expanding but large-scale quarrying operations were not always accessible to smaller communities. The pits at Drinaun would have been a practical, local resource, dug by hand and abandoned once the immediate need passed or the accessible material ran out. What remains is a series of slight depressions in the ground, unspectacular in themselves but legible, to a careful eye, as the trace of that working activity.