Near Gorteen in County Galway, a feature recorded as a gravel pit on early twentieth-century Ordnance Survey plans turned out, when someone finally went to look, to be little more than a tree-filled hollow with a dried-up pond at its centre.

The site appears on the 1932 edition of the OS six-inch map as a hachured area, the small radiating lines surveyors used to indicate a depression or raised feature in the terrain. An earlier large-scale plan, surveyed between 1912 and 1916, names it explicitly as a gravel pit. Gravel pits were working features of the rural landscape, dug to extract material for road-making and farm use, so the designation was entirely plausible. When an inspection was carried out in 1985, however, what surveyors found bore little resemblance to an active or even a recently disused extraction site. The hollow was overgrown with trees, and at its centre sat a pond that had long since dried up. Whether the cartographic label was always an error, or whether the landscape had changed considerably in the decades between survey and inspection, is not recorded.