Near Fahy in County Galway, a hachured symbol on the 1944 to 1945 revision of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map suggested, to anyone reading it hopefully, some kind of earthwork worthy of investigation. When the site was inspected in 1984, the reality turned out to be considerably more mundane: a large, irregular disused gravel pit that had been pressed into service as a dump, surrounded by low mounds of sand and gravel on its northern, eastern, and southern sides, sitting in ordinary undulating pastureland.

The story of the site is really a story about cartographic ambiguity. Hachures, the short radiating lines used on older maps to indicate slopes or depressions, can make a quarry or a pit read at a glance like an enclosure or a ringfort. In this case, the feature was post-1700 in origin, which placed it outside the scope of archaeological classification and left it in a quiet administrative gap, too recent to be ancient, too unremarkable to draw much attention otherwise. Gravel extraction of this kind was common across rural Ireland, producing small local pits that fed road-making and construction before industrial-scale quarrying took over.