On the 1946 revision of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, it appears as a hachured feature, the small radiating lines surveyors used to suggest a depression or earthwork of some kind. To anyone glancing at the map, it might have suggested an ancient enclosure, a collapsed souterrain, or some other remnant of early settlement. When the site was actually inspected in 1984, it turned out to be a disused quarry, almost certainly worked at some point after 1700.

The story of the place is really a story about what gets counted and what does not. Because the quarry post-dates AD 1700, it falls outside the scope of formal archaeological classification, which tends to concern itself with earlier remains. That boundary is not arbitrary; it reflects a practical effort to focus limited resources on prehistoric and early historic sites. But it does mean that a feature substantial enough to be marked on a mid-twentieth-century map, and curious enough to warrant a physical inspection four decades later, ends up sitting in a kind of administrative grey zone. The quarry itself was presumably used for extracting stone for local building or road maintenance, the kind of small-scale rural industry that once pocked the Irish countryside and has since been largely absorbed back into the landscape.