It is the kind of feature that most people would walk past without a second thought, yet it carries a small paper trail that gestures at the rhythms of rural industry in the west of Ireland.

By the time surveyors working on the Ordnance Survey's 1:2500 plan passed through the area between 1912 and 1916, the pits were already recorded as disused. The 1931 edition of the OS six-inch map renders the same feature as a hachured area, the cartographic shorthand for a hollow or depression in the ground. When the site was inspected in 1984, the visible evidence amounted to little more than that same depression, sitting amid the scrubby pasture. Gravel extraction of this kind was common in rural Ireland, typically supplying local road-making or drainage works, and rarely left anything more dramatic behind than a dip in the earth and a name on an old map.