Hachures on such maps typically indicate a slope or earthwork of some kind, the kind of mark that draws the eye and invites speculation about what lies beneath. When someone went to look in 1984, they found not an ancient enclosure or a forgotten earthwork but an oval depression, thickly overgrown with trees and bushes, almost certainly the remains of a disused sand or gravel quarry.

Small local quarries of this kind were once unremarkable features of the Irish countryside. Dug to extract sand or gravel for road maintenance, building work, or land drainage, they fell out of use as industrial supply chains replaced the need for purely local extraction. Without continued working, vegetation moves in quickly, and within a generation or two a working pit can look, from a distance, like something far older and more mysterious. The Gortaloughane site dates to after 1700, which places it firmly in the era of post-medieval agricultural and infrastructural activity rather than in the deeper prehistoric or early Christian past.