For years, the site was logged as an unclassified earthwork, a catch-all category often applied to surface disturbances that did not obviously fit any known archaeological type. Only a later review of the evidence confirmed that what had been puzzled over was, in fact, the remnant of small-scale gravel extraction.

The site first appeared in the Sites and Monuments Record in 1987, classified simply as an unclassified earthwork, and the ambiguity persisted into the revised Record of Monuments and Places in 1997. It was not until a subsequent assessment, compiled by Olive Alcock and uploaded in July 2015, that the classification was corrected to quarry. Gravel pits of this kind were once common across rural Ireland, dug to provide material for road surfacing, drainage work, or building foundations. They rarely survive in any dramatic form, tending instead to leave shallow, irregular depressions that can be easy to overlook or misread entirely, which may explain why this one spent so long in the wrong category.