At Moaty in County Galway, a roughly subcircular feature was marked on the 1946 to 1947 revision of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map by a series of dots, the conventional shorthand surveyors used to indicate something worth noting on the ground. By 1983, when someone went to look for it, nothing remained. No depression in the soil, no scatter of worked stone, no boundary, no hollow. The land had simply moved on.

The dots, and their arrangement, suggest the feature was a quarry, probably one worked at some point after 1700. Small quarries of this kind were once common across rural Ireland, opened locally to extract limestone or other stone for building walls, houses, or roads, and then abandoned once the immediate need was met. Without continued use or maintenance, they could fill in gradually, become overgrown, or be levelled by agricultural activity over the course of generations. What made this one worth recording at all was the map itself, a document of something that had already begun to disappear by the time the revision was made, and that had vanished entirely within a few decades of being noted down.