At Lughanagh in County Galway, a hachured marking on the 1932 edition of the OS six-inch map, the kind of shading cartographers used to suggest a break in the ground surface, pointed to something that looked, on paper, as though it might reward investigation.

When the site was examined in 1983, what emerged was a disused sand or gravel pit, now reduced to a shallow hollow set within pastureland. Small-scale extractions of this kind were commonplace across rural Ireland during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, typically dug to supply local needs: road-making, drainage, the mixing of mortar, or the improvement of agricultural land. They rarely left dramatic marks on the landscape, and most have long since been absorbed back into the fields around them. This one at Lughanagh is thought to date from that same broad period, though nothing more precise is known about who dug it or what it supplied. What survives is the hollow itself, unremarkable to look at, and the cartographic trace that kept the memory of it from disappearing entirely.