On the 1931 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, the spot is marked with hachures, the short radiating lines cartographers traditionally used to indicate a depression or earthwork. The implication, to anyone reading the map, is that something deliberate once happened here.

When the site was inspected in 1990, the reality turned out to be more modest: a disused gravel pit, probably dug sometime in the nineteenth or early twentieth century. Gravel pits of this kind were commonplace features of the rural Irish landscape, excavated to supply road-making or drainage work on nearby farmland, then abandoned once the material was exhausted or no longer needed. Over time the ground settles, grass grows back, and the pit becomes simply a dip in a field, legible as a human intervention only to those who know to look. What makes this one worth a second glance is less the pit itself than the gap between what the map seemed to promise and what the ground actually holds; a reminder that cartographic notation, however precise it looks, carries its own ambiguities.