For a time it carried the designation of a possible enclosure, implying the kind of ancient earthwork that dots the Irish countryside, sometimes the remains of a ringfort or a defined ceremonial space. That classification was eventually set aside, and what remains is something considerably more ordinary, though no less interesting for the reclassification itself.

The site at Glanlarehan appears on two separate Ordnance Survey editions, the six-inch Cassini map and the 1892 twenty-five-inch map, each time marked plainly as a small quarry. Quarrying on this kind of local scale, typically post-1700, was common across rural Ireland, producing stone for field walls, farm buildings, and road repairs without leaving the dramatic scarring of industrial extraction. The circular shape of the hollow, still visible on aerial photography taken between 2011 and 2013, is what likely caused the earlier confusion. A roughly round depression in the ground is exactly the sort of feature that can read ambiguously from a distance or from a historical map notation, sitting somewhere between an engineered earthwork and a worked landscape feature. The 1997 Record of Monuments and Places listed it cautiously as a possible enclosure, and it took subsequent review to resolve the matter in favour of the quarry interpretation.