The classification matters more than it might seem. An enclosure, in archaeological terms, typically refers to a defined area bounded by a bank, ditch, or wall, often associated with settlement, ritual, or agricultural activity in the early medieval or prehistoric period. Getting that label onto a site is enough to place it under protective scrutiny. Getting it onto a quarry is something else entirely.

Ordnance Survey maps tell the story simply enough. The 1923 edition of the six-inch map shows a small quarried area marked with hachures, the short lines surveyors use to indicate slopes and depressions. The twenty-five-inch map goes further, adding the word "Quarry" to remove any ambiguity. Yet the site entered the record as an enclosure in both the 1992 Sites and Monuments Record and the 1996 Record of Monuments and Places. When the site was physically inspected in 2002, the ground confirmed what the maps had always suggested: a large, roughly oval depression measuring around 46 metres east to west and 24 metres north to south, dropping to a depth of up to four metres. By that point it was being used to dump earth. Whatever stone or material was once extracted here left behind a substantial void, and that void had quietly accumulated a bureaucratic identity it was never meant to have.