They are disused gravel pits, long overgrown, and they owe what little documentary attention they have received to a cartographic accident: the 1932 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map marks them with hachures, the fine radiating lines surveyors used to indicate a depression or earthwork, lending the pits a visual gravity they were never quite meant to carry.

When someone looked more closely in 1983, the feature turned out to be not an ancient earthwork but two post-1700 extraction sites, dug at some point in the relatively recent past for gravel, most likely to surface local roads or farm tracks. Because they fall after the conventional threshold for archaeological significance, they sit outside the scope of formal prehistoric and early historic survey work, which tends to concern itself with features from before that date. The result is a pair of sites that appear on a map, were formally inspected, and then were quietly set aside, belonging fully neither to archaeology nor to any other category of record that might give them a clearer story.