When surveyors examined it in 1993, they were following up a hachured feature on the 1920 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, a type of marking used to indicate slopes, earthworks, or disturbed ground, the kind of symbol that often signals something worth investigating beneath. What they found was a quarry pit, post-1700 in date, and therefore outside the scope of the archaeological record that concerns itself with older, pre-modern remains.

That boundary, somewhere around the year 1700, is a practical line drawn in Irish archaeological survey work. Features and structures dating from after that point tend to fall under the remit of architectural or industrial heritage rather than prehistoric or early historic archaeology. A quarry of this age would most likely have served local agricultural or construction needs during the eighteenth or nineteenth century, when the extraction of stone for field walls, lime kilns, and building foundations was common across rural Ireland. The marshy, wet character of the land around it, lying east of a stream, suggests it may have been abandoned or flooded over time, which would partly explain why the surface impression survived long enough to appear on an Ordnance Survey map made in 1920.