On the 1944 to 1945 revision of the OS six-inch map, a hachured feature, a cartographic shorthand for a hollow or earthwork of some kind, appeared at this location, suggesting to later eyes that something of interest might lie there. When someone finally went to look in 1984, the feature turned out to be an infilled gravel pit, the depression all that remained of what had once been a working extraction site.

The story of how a gravel pit ends up on a map, and then gets investigated decades later, is a small illustration of how historical landscape records work in practice. Ordnance Survey revision teams noted anything that broke the surface of the land, and the hachured symbol they used here was the same one applied to earthworks of genuine antiquity, which is presumably why it attracted attention at all. The inspection confirmed that the pit dated to after AD 1700, placing it firmly in the post-medieval period rather than the archaeological one, and making it, in formal terms, unremarkable. But the slight depression remains, a faint trace of a practical, working landscape that has otherwise been absorbed back into the fields around it.