The site at Turlough in County Galway is recorded as a large, irregular disused quarry, the kind of working hollow that generations of local builders would have known well, and that later generations quietly forgot.

The quarry appears on the 1930 edition of the OS six-inch map, a series that captured Ireland's landscape in considerable detail during the early decades of the twentieth century. When inspectors visited the site in 1984, they found it already long abandoned, its irregular outline suggesting it had never been a tightly managed commercial operation but rather the sort of quarry that served local needs over many years, yielding stone for field walls, farmsteads, or roads, then falling out of use as those needs changed or easier sources became available. The irregular shape is itself a kind of record, reflecting the pragmatic and piecemeal way such places were worked, following the stone rather than any planned design.