On the Ordnance Survey six-inch map from the 1948 revision, the feature appears only as a hachured marking, the cartographic shorthand for a depression or irregular ground surface. It was not until a physical inspection in 1983 that the hollow was identified as almost certainly a disused quarry, the kind of small-scale extraction site that once dotted the Irish countryside, quietly feeding local construction and agriculture before falling out of use and out of memory.

The quarry's likely companion was a limekiln, a stone-built furnace used to burn limestone at high temperatures to produce quicklime, which farmers spread on acidic soils to improve fertility, and builders mixed into mortar. The Ordnance Survey 25-inch plan marks and names the kiln at the north-western end of the same hachured area, suggesting the two features functioned together: stone quarried from the hollow fed directly into the kiln nearby. This kind of small industrial pairing, quarry and kiln working in tandem, was commonplace across Connacht from the eighteenth century onward, though most examples have since been reclaimed by vegetation or simply forgotten. Because the site dates to after 1700, it falls outside the scope of formal archaeological classification, which means it occupies an awkward gap, too recent to be ancient, too obscure to have attracted much other attention.