Hachures are the short radiating lines cartographers used to indicate slopes or hollows, and on older OS maps they often mark earthworks, enclosures, or other features of potential antiquity. This one, however, turned out to be rather more mundane than its appearance on paper might have suggested. When the site was visited in 1983, it proved to be a quarry, almost certainly worked sometime after 1700.

There is something quietly telling about this small episode of fieldwork. A mark on a map, suggestive enough to warrant investigation, resolves itself into a working scar in the landscape rather than a ringfort or souterrain. Quarries of this period were common features of the rural Irish countryside, dug to extract limestone or other local stone for building walls, roads, and farmsteads, and they rarely leave behind the kind of dramatic profile that catches the eye. The Shangarry example was post-medieval enough to fall outside the scope of formal archaeological classification, which concerns itself with remains predating 1700, and so it passed out of that particular frame of reference having been looked at, noted, and set aside.