In the undulating pastureland of Liss in County Galway, a gravel pit once existed in a form substantial enough to earn its own mark on Ordnance Survey cartography. By the time anyone went looking for it in earnest, the land had moved on entirely.

The pit appears on the 1920 edition of the OS six-inch map as a hachured feature, those short radiating lines used by cartographers to suggest a depression or earthwork in the ground. On the larger-scale OS 25-inch plan it is named directly: Gravel Pit (Disused). The word disused is telling. Even in the early twentieth century, when the map was being compiled, the working life of the pit had already ended. Gravel extraction of this kind was commonplace in rural Ireland from the eighteenth century onward, supplying material for road-making, drainage works, and estate improvement. When inspectors visited the Liss site in 1983, no surface trace of any kind had survived. The hollow, if it ever was one, had been absorbed back into the fields.