In an area of rough grazing in Moat, County Galway, there is a site that no longer shows any trace of itself above ground, and yet was considered significant enough to be mapped, named, and formally recorded. What was once a small gravel pit has vanished so completely that even the shallow depression or disturbed earth that might betray its former outline has gone, leaving only the cartographic evidence that it ever existed at all.

The pit appears on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map edition of 1931, marked with hachuring, the small radiating lines surveyors used to indicate a hollow or excavated feature in the landscape. An earlier and more detailed OS plan at the 1:2500 scale, surveyed between 1912 and 1916, names it plainly as a gravel pit. Gravel extraction of this kind was common in rural Ireland during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when local road maintenance and farm lane improvements depended on whatever aggregate could be dug from nearby ground. Such pits were generally modest affairs, worked by hand, and often abandoned once the accessible material was exhausted. Without continued disturbance or visible spoil heaps, they could be reclaimed by vegetation and grazing animals within a generation or two. This one, probably of nineteenth or early twentieth century date, followed exactly that trajectory.