What makes it mildly curious is the gap between its cartographic life and its physical one: for decades it existed on paper as a hachured feature, the old mapmaker's shorthand for a depression or earthwork, before anyone went to check what it actually was.

When someone did inspect the site in 1984, working from the 1947 to 1948 revision of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, the feature turned out to be a tree-filled pit, most likely the remains of a disused quarry. Because it dates to after 1700, it falls outside the scope of formal archaeological classification in Ireland, which tends to concern itself with earlier remains. That boundary is not a judgement on the quarry's interest so much as a practical line drawn around a very large country with a great many sites. Quarries like this one were a common feature of demesne landscapes, dug to supply stone for estate walls, buildings, and estate improvements that were particularly intensive in eighteenth and nineteenth century Ireland. Portumna Demesne, attached to Portumna Castle on the southern shore of Lough Derg, was one of the more substantial such estates in Connacht, which gives the pit a plausible context even if the specifics of its use go unrecorded.