At Keeloges in County Galway, a feature marked on early twentieth-century Ordnance Survey maps as a disused quarry turned out, when someone finally went to look in 1984, to be nothing more than an old sand pit sitting quietly in pastureland.

The site appears on the 1931 edition of the OS six-inch map as a hachured area, a cartographic convention using short radiating lines to suggest a depression or earthwork, and is labelled "Quarry (Disused)" on the more detailed OS 1:2500 plan surveyed between 1912 and 1916. For decades, then, it carried the weight of that name on paper, suggesting stone extraction and perhaps some minor industrial past, when the reality was considerably more modest. Sand pits of this kind were commonplace in rural Ireland, dug to supply local building and agricultural needs, and they rarely left much trace beyond a shallow hollow in the ground. The discrepancy between the map label and the physical reality is a small reminder of how casually the surveyors of that era sometimes recorded what they found, or what they were told.