When it first appeared on official heritage records in the 1990s, this disused quarry was classified as an earthwork, a category that conjures ancient ringforts or burial mounds rather than the mundane business of extracting gravel. The gap between what a site looks like on paper and what it turns out to be on the ground is a recurring feature of landscape archaeology, and this small pit is a neat example of that.

The quarry shows up as a hachured area, that is, marked with short lines indicating a slope or hollow, on the 1922 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map. By the time the twenty-five-inch map was produced, it had been named as a disused gravel pit. When someone finally visited the site in 2002, the ground confirmed what the cartography had long suggested: a worked-out quarry measuring roughly 44 metres northwest to southeast and 28 metres northeast to southwest. It is a small footprint, the kind of place that served a purely local purpose, supplying gravel for a road or a building project, and was then simply abandoned and left to grass over.