The confusion arose because early surveyors, working from the 1922 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, saw the hachuring, the short lines used to indicate slopes or disturbed ground, and assumed something archaeological lay beneath. It was only when the larger-scale twenty-five-inch map was consulted that a more straightforward label appeared: "Quarry (disused)".

When the site was inspected in 2001, what surveyors found was an irregular quarried area measuring roughly 38 metres north to south and 80 metres east to west, a substantial extraction of material that left an uneven scar on the ground. The most plausible explanation for why the stone or fill was removed points to a nearby battery, a fortified artillery emplacement, which would have required considerable quantities of rubble and compacted material during its construction. The quarry at Lakyle may simply have been the convenient source, its contents carted away to build something more militarily purposeful, leaving behind a depression that confused later generations of map-readers and record-keepers alike.