It appears on the 1838 Ordnance Survey six-inch map as a rectangular enclosure, carefully marked with hachures, the small lines surveyors used to indicate banks or raised boundaries, and labelled with the name Sandy Banks. Visit the spot today and you will find nothing at ground level, and nobody in the locality who remembers anything being there at all.

What exactly Sandy Banks was is genuinely uncertain. The most plausible suggestion is that it functioned as a sand quarry, a working extraction site that has since been levelled, filled in, or simply eroded away over the nearly two centuries since the OS surveyors recorded it. The rectangular outline they mapped would be consistent with a managed quarrying operation rather than, say, a field boundary or a settlement enclosure. Sand quarrying was common in rural Ireland for construction and agricultural use, and such sites were rarely treated as landmarks worth preserving in local memory. The 1838 map itself is the sole surviving witness, and even that gives little away beyond the shape and the name.