That is more or less what happened at Drumellihy in County Clare, where a small excavation cut into the western face of a ridge was catalogued as an archaeological enclosure in both the 1992 Sites and Monuments Record and the 1996 Record of Monuments and Places before anyone went to look at it properly.

When an inspection was finally carried out in 2002, the site resolved itself into something considerably more mundane: a disused quarry, roughly 34 metres north to south and 40 metres east to west, with a maximum depth of about 2.2 metres. The Ordnance Survey had mapped it twice over. The six-inch edition of 1922 shows the quarried area marked with hachures, the conventional cartographic symbol for a slope or depression, while the more detailed 25-inch map goes further, labelling it plainly as a gravel pit, and a disused one at that. The archaeological designation had apparently persisted despite this cartographic evidence sitting quietly in the record all along. It is a small illustration of how sites can accumulate official identities that outlast the evidence behind them, and how a feature that registers on a map as an anomaly can travel some distance through administrative systems before someone walks out to check.