On the western face of a low hummock in the pastureland of Moorfield, County Galway, a small gravel pit once broke the surface of the ground enough to earn itself a name and a mark on two separate Ordnance Survey maps. By the time anyone went to look for it in 1984, it had gone, leaving the grass untroubled and the hummock unmarked.

The feature appeared as a small hachured symbol, the conventional cartographic shorthand for a hollow or depression, on the 1944 to 1945 revision of the six-inch Ordnance Survey map. The larger-scale twenty-five-inch plan was more forthcoming with a label: "Gravel Pit (Disused)". Even at the moment of its recording, then, it was already a former thing. Gravel pits of this kind were commonplace in rural Ireland from the eighteenth century onwards, dug to surface farm tracks or provide material for local building and drainage work. They were rarely deep or extensive, and once exhausted they were quickly absorbed back into the surrounding land through grazing, weathering, and the slow creep of soil. This one had been post-1700 in date, which placed it outside the scope of formal archaeological classification, a boundary that in practice separates medieval from post-medieval remains in Irish survey work.

What makes this site worth pausing over is precisely its thoroughness of disappearance. The 1984 inspection confirmed no visible surface trace whatsoever. A feature recorded on a mid-twentieth-century map, itself already labelled as disused, had by then been fully reclaimed. The hummock in the pasture remains, but whatever shallow wound the pit made in its western flank has long since closed over.