What had been recorded on the 1944 to 1945 revision of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map as a hachured feature, the kind of shading used to suggest a depression or earthwork of some kind, turned out on closer examination in 1984 to be nothing more dramatic than a disused limestone quarry. The gap between the marking and the investigation is itself quietly telling: nearly forty years during which a modest scar in the landscape sat on paper, waiting to be explained.

Limestone quarrying on this small, local scale was common across the west of Ireland from the eighteenth century onward, with farmers and landowners extracting stone for building walls, lime kilns, and field drainage. A lime kiln, to explain the term, was a simple furnace used to burn limestone into quicklime, which could then be spread on acidic land to improve its fertility. The Woodfield quarry post-dates 1700, which places it firmly in the era of agricultural improvement and estate development that reshaped much of the Connacht landscape. Because it falls within that post-medieval period, it sits outside the chronological scope of archaeological protection, which in Ireland generally concerns itself with sites from earlier centuries.