On a low rise in the undulating pastureland of Muckanagh in County Galway, a set of gravel pits once sat in the landscape, worked and then abandoned, significant enough to be marked on Ordnance Survey maps but eventually so thoroughly reclaimed by the land that when someone came to look for them in 1984, there was nothing to find.

The pits appear on the 1944 to 1945 revision of the OS 6-inch map as a hachured feature, the term referring to the short radiating lines cartographers used to indicate a depression or excavated area in the ground. On the larger-scale OS 25-inch plan, they are named plainly as "Gravel Pits (Disused)", suggesting that by the time the map was drawn they had already fallen out of use. Gravel extraction of this kind was common in post-medieval Ireland, supplying material for road surfaces, drainage work, and farm tracks, and was generally small-scale and locally driven. By the time of the 1984 inspection, no visible surface trace of any kind survived. The rise in the pasture had simply closed over whatever had been dug from it.