On the 1932 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map covering Lattoon in County Galway, a hachured feature, the kind of shading cartographers use to suggest a depression or break in the ground, marks a spot in what is otherwise unremarkable pastureland. It looks like it might mean something old.

When the site was inspected in 1983, the feature turned out to be a deep, overgrown, and long-disused gravel pit. Because it dates to after AD 1700, it falls outside the scope of formal archaeological recording, which in Ireland generally concerns itself with earlier remains. That boundary is a practical one, but it does produce a minor irony: a feature mysterious enough on paper to warrant investigation turns out to be too recent to be officially counted, and so it sits in a kind of administrative no-man's-land, noted and then set aside. The pit itself, now swallowed by vegetation, is the sort of thing that reads as ancient from a distance but is really just the residue of post-medieval land use, gravel extraction being a common enough activity wherever road maintenance or building required loose aggregate material.