Hachures, those fine radiating lines used by cartographers to suggest a depression or earthwork, can indicate anything from a ring fort to a burial mound, and so the feature carried a quiet ambiguity for decades. When someone finally went out to look in 1984, the ground told a more ordinary story: a partially overgrown hollow, almost certainly the remains of a disused sand or gravel quarry, dug sometime after 1700.

There is something quietly instructive about this particular non-discovery. The gap between what a map seems to promise and what the earth actually holds is a familiar problem in Irish field archaeology. A cartographic symbol, made by a surveyor who may simply have noted a dip in the ground, can persist through successive map revisions and accumulate an unearned air of significance. In this case, the inspection confirmed nothing older than the post-medieval period, which places it outside the scope of formal archaeological recording. The hollow in the pasture at Lissanacody is, in the end, a working scar in the landscape, the kind left by small-scale local extraction of sand or gravel for building or road-making, common across rural Ireland from the eighteenth century onward.