The mix-up is a small but telling reminder of how landscape features can deceive at a distance, and how the business of cataloguing Ireland's archaeological heritage sometimes throws up surprises of a deflating rather than revelatory kind.

In 1987, the site appeared in the Sites and Monuments Record listed under the category of enclosure, a broad term used in Irish archaeology to describe anything from a prehistoric ringfort to a walled field system of uncertain date. That same year, a physical inspection settled the matter: the feature was a quarry, a working extraction site rather than a structure shaped by human settlement or ritual. The name Gorteennamuck, derived from the Irish for something in the region of "little field of the pigs", gives the landscape an earthier character that perhaps suits this kind of correction well.