At a location in County Galway carrying the evocative name Fairyhill, a small quarry, most likely a sand pit, appears on the 1837 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, the first systematic large-scale mapping of Ireland, and then vanishes from the documentary trail entirely.

The six-inch OS maps of the 1830s were remarkable instruments of record, capturing not just roads and townland boundaries but the texture of working rural life, including the small extractive operations that supplied local farms and building projects with sand, gravel, and stone. A sand pit of this kind would have been a modest, functional thing, dug to meet immediate local need rather than any industrial ambition. Because it dates to after 1700, it falls outside the period that formal archaeological survey programmes typically cover, which means it has received no field investigation and sits in an administrative gap between history and archaeology. The name Fairyhill adds a layer of curiosity; such placenames in Ireland often reflect older landscape beliefs, the idea that certain hills or mounds were associated with the otherworld, though whether the name here carries any such weight or is simply a local usage is not recorded.