On the 1931 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, the spot appears as a hachured area, the cartographic convention used to indicate a depression or raised feature in the landscape. It was only when someone went to look in person, in 1984, that the hollow resolved itself into something more prosaic: a disused gravel pit, almost certainly dug during the nineteenth or early twentieth century and long since abandoned to the grass and the gradual forgetting that comes to any working hollow once the work is done.

There is something quietly interesting about the gap between the map and the place. The hachure marks on an OS six-inch sheet were a practical shorthand, designed to convey terrain at a glance, but they were never precise enough to distinguish a natural landform from a man-made extraction site. For over fifty years, this particular hollow existed in that ambiguity on paper, its origins unconfirmed. Gravel pits of this period were common throughout rural Ireland, dug to supply material for road surfacing and farm tracks, typically small-scale operations that left little documentary trace beyond the scar in the ground itself.