Recorded as an 'Earthwork' in the Sites and Monuments Record in 1992 and again in the Record of Monuments and Places in 1996, it sat on paper alongside ringforts, standing stones, and ancient enclosures, suggesting something of historical significance waiting in the landscape.

The confusion began with a map. The 1923 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map showed a small subcircular hachured area at the location, the kind of marking that cartographers used to indicate a depression or earthwork of potential interest. Hachuring on early OS maps was a shorthand for topographic irregularity, and when such features were being catalogued for the monuments record, this one was duly included. When the site was physically inspected in 2003, however, the reality was considerably more mundane: a slight, irregular hollow, no more than 0.2 to 0.4 metres deep and roughly 28 metres at its widest, with every indication that it had simply been quarried at some point. No archaeology, no monument, just a scar left by the extraction of stone or earth, misread across the decades through the intermediary of an old map.