On the 1944 to 1945 revision of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, a hachured mark, the cartographer's shorthand for a hollow or depression in the ground, sits in the pastureland of Abbeyland Great in County Galway. It was not until 1984 that anyone inspected it closely enough to confirm what it actually was: a disused quarry, long since abandoned and grassed over into the surrounding farmland.

The quarry dates to after 1700, which places it in a period of considerable agricultural and infrastructural activity across rural Ireland, when local stone was routinely extracted for field walls, farmbuildings, and estate improvements. Because it falls within the post-medieval period, it sits outside the scope of the bodies tasked with cataloguing prehistoric and early historic monuments, which is itself a small illustration of how Ireland's landscape features can slip between the categories that official memory uses to organise the past. The townland name, Abbeyland Great, hints at earlier ecclesiastical landholding in the area, though the quarry's own story is more modest: a practical working hollow that served its purpose and was quietly forgotten.