In the level pastureland of Lattoon in County Galway, a hachured feature on the 1932 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, the kind of shading cartographers used to indicate a depression or earthwork, turned out on closer inspection to be nothing more dramatic than a disused gravel pit. It is a small reminder that even the most carefully annotated historical maps record the mundane alongside the significant, and that the two are not always easy to tell apart from a distance.