It is the kind of feature that most walkers would step over without a second thought, yet it earned itself a place on the official Ordnance Survey record, rendered in the shorthand of cartography as a hachured mark, the small radiating lines that surveyors use to indicate a depression or slope in the terrain.

The hollow appeared on the 1947 to 1948 revision of the six-inch Ordnance Survey map, which was enough to prompt a closer look. When someone did look, in 1984, they found not an ancient earthwork or a buried structure but a disused gravel pit, its working days long over and its edges softened by decades of grass. Because the pit dates to after AD 1700, it falls outside the scope of archaeological classification in Ireland, which concerns itself with features from earlier periods. In that sense, the site exists in a bureaucratic gap: old enough to appear on mid-twentieth-century maps, not old enough to be considered archaeology.