What investigators eventually found on the ground, when someone walked the site in July 2002, was a large elongated quarry, roughly fifty metres long and reaching a maximum depth of about 1.2 metres. It is a modest discovery on the face of it, yet the gap between aerial intrigue and ground-level inspection neatly captures how much of Ireland's landscape archaeology works: a shadow or soil mark in a photograph, a decade of uncertainty, and then a pair of boots in a field.

The site had already been named on the Ordnance Survey 25-inch map as a disused quarry, so its broad character was not a complete surprise. What the aerial photograph added was the suggestion that there might be something archaeologically significant at or beneath the surface, enough to earn the location entries in both the Sites and Monuments Record of 1992 and the Record of Monuments and Places in 1996. Disused quarries in rural Ireland are rarely glamorous subjects, but they carry their own quiet history. They supplied the raw material for field walls, roads, and buildings, and were often worked at the margins of farmland over centuries. Whether the Moyadda More quarry dates to any particular period or was simply a practical local resource remains, on current evidence, an open question.