The 1930 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map marks the spot with a circular hachured symbol, the kind of notation that on older maps could signal anything from a ringfort to a quarry to something less easily categorised. When the site was inspected in 1984, the mystery resolved itself simply: the feature was a sand and gravel pit, worked from the same ridge that a retreating glacier had deposited there thousands of years earlier.

Glacial ridges of this kind, built up from debris carried and then abandoned by ice during the last glaciation, are common across the Irish midlands and west. They tend to sit above the surrounding terrain in ways that made them useful to later generations, whether as vantage points, dry routes across boggy ground, or, as here, convenient sources of aggregate. Sand and gravel pits dug into such ridges were a practical necessity for road-making and construction, and many were small, localised operations serving a single townland. The gap between the map symbol of 1930 and the ground inspection of 1984 leaves open the question of when exactly the pit was in active use, and whether it was already abandoned by the time the cartographers passed through.