When surveyors mapped the area in 1893 for the Ordnance Survey 25-inch series, they labelled it a disused gravel pit. By 1923, the 6-inch revision reduced it to a small semi-circle of hachures, the cartographic shorthand for a depression in the ground. It was only later that the site was formally recorded, and even then it was filed under the somewhat vague category of earthwork, a classification that tells you more about administrative convenience than about what the place actually is.

The quarry itself is not large: roughly 16 metres north to south and 21 metres east to west, hollowed to a depth of between four and six metres directly from the rock. At its north-eastern edge sits a shallower companion hollow, slightly wider at 26 metres east to west, suggesting either an earlier phase of extraction or a separate working area. What makes the site linger in the mind is the local name for the material taken from it. The quarried stone is known in the area as coldstone, a term that does not appear in any standard geological glossary but carries the kind of specificity that only comes from generations of people working a particular material and finding their own words for it. Whether coldstone refers to the temperature the rock retains, its colour, or some quality of the way it sits in the landscape is not recorded, but the name alone suggests that this was no casual or anonymous extraction.