At Rusheeny in County Galway, a hachured feature, the cartographic shorthand for a depression or earthwork, appeared on the 1945 revision of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map in a way that might have suggested something older and more significant beneath the grass. When someone finally went to look in 1984, it turned out to be a gravel quarry, modest and post-medieval, and that was more or less the end of the matter.

The quarry dates to after 1700, which places it firmly in the era of improving landlords, road-building schemes, and the steady extraction of local material for drainage and construction across the west of Ireland. Gravel quarries of this kind were workaday features of the rural landscape, dug where the ground offered something useful and abandoned when it did not. Because the site falls after the archaeological threshold of AD 1700, it sits outside the scope of formal prehistoric and early historic survey, leaving it in a quiet administrative limbo, documented just enough to explain why it will not be documented further.