In the meadowland around Kilmore in County Galway, a hachured marking on the 1926 revision of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map suggested something worth noting, a feature in the landscape that cartographers had thought significant enough to record. When someone finally went to look in 1984, the reality was more modest: an overgrown gravel pit, quietly disappearing back into the grass.

The gap between the map and the ground is the interesting part here. Hachuring, a cartographic technique using short lines to indicate slope or depression, gave the feature a certain visual weight on paper. But the pit itself dates to after 1700, placing it firmly in the era of agricultural improvement and road-building, when gravel was extracted across rural Ireland for practical, unglamorous purposes. Because it falls outside the pre-1700 threshold, it sits beyond the scope of archaeological classification, which means it occupies an odd administrative limbo: recorded, visited, identified, and then essentially set aside.