On the 1945 revision of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, the feature appears as a hachured marking, the fine radiating lines cartographers used to suggest a hollow or raised earthwork. It looked, at a glance, like something ancient.

When the site was visited in 1984, the mystery dissolved quietly. The feature was a disused quarry, its edges long since softened by encroaching woodland. Because it dates to after AD 1700, it falls outside the scope of formal archaeological classification, which generally concerns itself with earlier material remains. That boundary, reasonable enough in principle, has the curious side effect of leaving sites like this in a kind of administrative no-man's-land: too recent to be ancient, too forgotten to be industrial heritage in any recognised sense. What had once been a working hollow in the Galway landscape, probably opened to extract stone for local building, had become grassland and trees and a mark on a map that briefly suggested something more.