On a ridge in the pastureland of Gortmorris in County Galway, a hachured area, the cartographic shorthand used on Ordnance Survey maps to indicate a depression or earthwork, was printed on the 1930 edition of the OS 6-inch map. It sat there, unverified, until 1984, when an inspection confirmed it to be a disused quarry pit.

That gap of more than fifty years between record and reality is not unusual in Irish archaeological and heritage surveys. The 6-inch OS maps, produced through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, captured the landscape with considerable care, but the symbols used were sometimes applied to features that had not been visited directly. A hachured mark could indicate a natural hollow, a collapsed structure, or, as here, the scar left by small-scale quarrying. Quarry pits of this kind were common across rural Ireland, often worked locally to extract stone for field walls, farm buildings, or road surfaces, and then abandoned once the immediate need was met or the accessible material exhausted. Without documentary records tying such workings to a particular landowner or period, it is rarely possible to say when quarrying began or ended.