In the rolling pastureland of Gortnamona in County Galway, a feature on an old map drew enough attention to warrant a physical visit, only to reveal itself as a shallow hollow in the ground, the remains of a disused gravel pit.

The feature first appeared as a hachured marking on the 1920 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map. Hachuring, a technique used to indicate changes in relief or earthwork features, can suggest anything from a ringfort to a burial mound, so the notation was not without interest. When the site was inspected in 1983, however, the reality was more prosaic: a slight depression in the earth, consistent with a gravel extraction pit that had long since fallen out of use. Because the pit dates to after AD 1700, it falls outside the scope of prehistoric and early historic archaeology, which tends to focus on earlier periods. The site is, in that sense, too recent to be ancient and too unremarkable to be otherwise notable, which is precisely what makes it worth a moment's thought.