On a low hill rising out of the flat, wet bogland of Gortanummera in County Galway, a gravel pit once existed, worked and then abandoned, its physical presence eventually erased so completely that when someone came to look for it in 1983, not a trace remained on the surface.

The pit appears on the 1947 revision of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, marked with the hachured symbol cartographers used to denote earthworks or disturbed ground, and labelled on the larger-scale OS 25-inch plan simply as a gravel pit, disused. Gravel extraction of this kind was a common enough activity in post-medieval rural Ireland, where local material was dug out for road-making, drainage works, or farm improvement. By the time of the 1983 inspection, the hill had apparently healed over entirely, leaving no depression, no spoil heap, no visible sign that the ground had ever been opened. The feature is noted as post-1700 in date, which places it outside the scope of prehistoric and early historic archaeology, but does nothing to diminish the mild strangeness of its complete disappearance.