The 1932 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map shows a hachured marking at this location, the kind of shading surveyors used to indicate a depression or earthwork in the landscape. It looked, on paper at least, like something worth investigating.

When the site was inspected in 1983, the feature turned out to be a large but shallow, overgrown, disused sand or gravel pit. Pits of this kind were worked widely across Ireland from the eighteenth century onwards, extracting loose surface deposits for road-making, building, and agricultural drainage. Because this one dates to after 1700, it falls outside the scope of archaeological classification, which generally concerns itself with earlier remains. What the map had preserved, in its careful hatching, was simply the memory of a local extraction site that had long since been abandoned to scrub and grass.