In Fahy, County Galway, a hachured symbol on the 1944 to 1945 revision of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, the kind of crosshatched shorthand cartographers used to indicate a depression or earthwork, turned out, on physical inspection in 1984, to be nothing more than a disused gravel pit. Today it survives as an overgrown irregular hollow in the ground, unassuming enough that you might walk past it without a second thought.

The pit dates to after 1700, which places it firmly in the era of organised land improvement and estate management rather than prehistoric or early medieval activity. Small-scale quarrying of gravel and stone was common across rural Ireland during this period, supplying material for road surfacing, drainage works, and building. Once exhausted, such pits were simply abandoned, left to fill gradually with vegetation while the landscape closed around them. This one was noted on a mid-twentieth-century map revision, suggesting it was still legible in the terrain at that point, even if its original purpose had long been forgotten by then.