On a grassy hummock at Stowlin in County Galway, something was once marked on a map, and by the time anyone went to look, it had completely vanished. The 1944 to 1945 revision of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map shows a hachured feature at this location, hachures being the small radiating lines cartographers used to indicate a depression, mound, or disturbed ground. When the site was inspected in 1984, no visible surface trace remained. The land had been cleared of field boundaries and surface features, and whatever had once given the mapmakers pause was gone.

The best interpretation cartographic evidence allows is that the feature was probably a quarry, likely dating to after 1700. Small post-medieval quarries of this kind were common across rural Ireland, often dug to extract limestone or other local stone for building, road repair, or lime production. Lime kilns and their associated quarry pits were working features of the agricultural landscape well into the nineteenth century, and many have since been levelled by the same kind of field improvement that appears to have erased this one. Without physical remains to examine, and with a probable post-1700 date placing it outside the scope of prehistoric and early historic archaeology, the site sits in a quiet administrative limbo, noted but essentially unverifiable.