In a patch of pastureland in Derry townland, County Galway, a series of irregular depressions in the ground once caught the attention of cartographers and later of fieldworkers, only to be confirmed as the unspectacular remains of a disused gravel pit, almost certainly worked sometime after 1700.

The story of how it came to notice at all belongs to the particular world of Ordnance Survey revision work. On the 1944 to 1945 revision of the OS six-inch map, the feature was recorded using hachures, the fine hatched lines surveyors traditionally used to suggest sunken or raised ground. That marking was enough to prompt a field inspection in 1984, at which point the depressions were examined and identified. Gravel extraction of this kind was a routine part of rural land management, producing material for road surfaces, drainage works, and building, and such pits were once scattered widely across the Irish countryside. Most have long since been absorbed back into agricultural land, leaving only subtle dips and hollows that puzzle the eye without quite announcing themselves. This one did the same, and the inspection simply gave a name to what the ground had already quietly said.