For years it occupied a place in the State's monument records, first in the Sites and Monuments Record of 1992 and then in the Record of Monuments and Places in 1996, catalogued under the category of enclosure, which typically denotes a defined area bounded by an earthwork, bank, or ditch of early historic or prehistoric origin. The paperwork suggested one thing; the landscape, it turned out, suggested another.

The original classification appears to have stemmed from the Ordnance Survey mapping record. A small hachured feature, the fine lines used by cartographers to indicate slopes or disturbed ground, appears on the 1897 OS six-inch map of the area. On the larger-scale twenty-five-inch map, the same feature is marked and labelled simply as a quarry. When the site was inspected in 2000, no evidence of any earlier features was found. The enclosure designation, carried forward through two successive monument registers on the basis of a cartographic symbol, dissolved on contact with the actual place. What remained was a quarry, and nothing more.