For anyone familiar with Ordnance Survey mapping conventions, hachured features, the short radiating lines used to indicate slopes or raised ground, carry a certain promise. Spotted on the 1944 to 1945 revision of the OS 6-inch map, these two markings had the appearance of features that might reward closer attention.

When an inspection was carried out in 1984, the reality turned out to be more mundane, though not entirely without interest. The mounds and hollows were the remnants of disused gravel pits, worked at some point after 1700. Gravel extraction of this kind was common across rural Ireland, supplying material for road surfacing and farm tracks long before industrialised quarrying changed the landscape. Because the pits post-date AD 1700, they fall outside the chronological scope of formal archaeological recording, which tends to concern itself with earlier remains. The site at Moorfield is, in that sense, a place that cartography made briefly mysterious and fieldwork quietly resolved.