On the grounds of Eyrecourt Demesne in County Galway, what was once recorded as a quarry on Ordnance Survey maps had, by the time anyone thought to look closely, reduced itself to little more than a shallow dip in a field, its outline suggested less by the land itself than by a scrappy band of nettles growing along its edge.

The feature appeared as a hachured marking, a cartographic convention used to indicate a depression or hollow in the terrain, on the 1944 to 1945 revision of the six-inch Ordnance Survey map. When the site was inspected on the ground in 1984, that depression was all that remained visible. It was probably a sand or gravel pit, the kind of small working quarry that demesne estates routinely maintained to supply material for road surfaces, drainage works, or construction on the property. Such pits were practical rather than monumental, dug as needed and abandoned without ceremony when the immediate work was done. Over decades of agricultural improvement, the land around Eyrecourt was levelled and managed until the pit's edges blurred almost entirely into the surrounding pasture.