In the pastureland of Keeloges, County Galway, a feature marked on Ordnance Survey maps as a gravel pit turned out to be something rather different. When the site was inspected in 1984, what cartographers had recorded as a disused gravel pit was identified as a quarry, a distinction that matters: gravel pits extract loose, unconsolidated material, while quarries involve the cutting or blasting of bedrock. The two leave different marks on the land, and the presence of a quarry where a gravel pit was assumed points to a small but telling gap between what surveyors recorded from a distance and what the ground actually held.

The paper trail for this site runs across two mapping generations. The Ordnance Survey 1:2500 plan, surveyed between 1912 and 1916, named the feature a gravel pit and marked it as disused, suggesting that by the early twentieth century it had already fallen out of active use. The 1931 edition of the OS six-inch map recorded the same area as a hachured feature, hachures being the short lines used on older maps to indicate a depression or earthwork of some kind. It was only the 1984 inspection that resolved the ambiguity, reclassifying the site from gravel pit to quarry pit. What was being extracted there, and when the quarrying was at its height, the surviving record does not say.