Hachuring, the cartographer's shorthand of small radiating lines used to suggest a hollow or depression in the ground, was enough to attract attention, implying perhaps an earthwork of some antiquity. When someone finally went to look in 1983, the feature turned out to be a disused sand pit, dug at some point after 1700 and long since abandoned to the grass and the years.

There is a particular kind of bathetic charm in a site that accumulates official curiosity only to reveal itself as a hole in the ground of no great age. The sand pit at Ower is, by the measure of Irish archaeology, a recent thing. Because it post-dates AD 1700, it falls outside the scope of formal prehistoric and early historic survey work, which tends to concern itself with raths, megalithic tombs, souterrains, and the longer stretch of human activity on the island. A sand pit dug in the eighteenth or nineteenth century would have served entirely practical purposes, supplying material for construction, land drainage, or mortar, depending on the quality of the sand and the needs of whoever worked the land nearby. That it was marked on a mid-twentieth-century map at all suggests it was still a legible feature of the landscape at that point, a visible scar rather than something already smoothed back into the field.