Overgrown and unassuming, it sits in a landscape that gives little away, and for decades it existed on maps as nothing more than a hachured marking, the cartographic shorthand used on Ordnance Survey sheets to indicate a change in ground level or a depression in the terrain.

When the 1948 revision of the six-inch Ordnance Survey map was drawn up, whoever recorded this feature left it as an ambiguity. It was not until 1983 that an on-the-ground inspection resolved the question: the hollow was the remains of a disused quarry, post-dating 1700, where stone had once been extracted from the hillside and the land had since been left to grass over and subside into itself. Because it falls after that 1700 threshold, it sits outside the scope of archaeological classification, which in Ireland generally concerns itself with features from earlier periods. That boundary, though administratively tidy, has the odd effect of leaving relatively recent industrial traces in a kind of documentary grey area, noted but not quite claimed by any particular field of study.

What remains at Gorteeny is modest: a sunken outline in the pasture, more legible to someone who knows what to look for than to a casual eye. Small quarries like this one were once scattered across rural Ireland, worked locally to supply stone for field walls, farmhouses, and roads, then abandoned when the need passed or the seam ran out. The landscape absorbed them gradually, and this one is now more of an impression than a feature, a place where the ground remembers something the surface no longer shows clearly.