What had been recorded on the 1933 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map as a hachured feature, the cross-hatched markings cartographers used to suggest a depression or earthwork, turned out on inspection in 1983 to be nothing more mysterious than an overgrown excavation, its edges softened by decades of vegetation.

The pit post-dates 1700, which places it firmly in the era of improving landlords, road-building schemes, and the kind of small-scale extraction that kept rural construction ticking along. Gravel pits like this one were workaday features of the landscape, dug to provide material for local tracks and lanes, then quietly abandoned when the need passed or the supply ran thin. The 1983 inspection confirmed what the hollow suggested: that this was not an ancient monument but a practical scar left by relatively recent human activity, the kind of site that accumulates moss and bracken rather than mythology.