At Templemartin in County Galway, one such marking on the 1933 edition of the six-inch OS map carried exactly that ambiguity, sitting quietly on the paper for decades before anyone went to check.

When a field inspection was carried out in 1983, the feature turned out to be a gravel pit, dug at some point after 1700. That date matters in a specific administrative sense, since archaeological survey work in Ireland has traditionally concerned itself with sites predating that threshold. A post-medieval gravel pit, however useful it may once have been to local road-makers or builders, falls outside that scope entirely. So the site was noted, identified, and set aside. What had looked like a possible antiquity on paper was, in the ground, simply a hole where gravel used to be.