These are fulachta fiadh, a type of prehistoric cooking place found across Ireland, typically identified by a horseshoe-shaped mound of burnt and shattered stone beside a trough and a water source. They are among the most common archaeological monuments in the Irish landscape, yet the cluster at Sraghgaddy occupies a particular kind of ambiguity: recorded, numbered, but not individually located.

The early Ordnance Survey mapping described this area as marshy ground, crossed by a stream running north-west to south-east, exactly the kind of wet, low-lying terrain where fulachta fiadh are most often found. Water was essential to the process, the trough being filled and then heated by dropping fire-scorched stones into it. By the time the Ordnance Survey revised its maps around 1900, a railway line running north-east to south-west had been cut through the area, reshaping the ground considerably. The sites were first noted formally by Prendergast in 1955, who listed Shraghgaddy townland in Gowran barony as containing at least six fulacht fiadh sites. They were uncovered more concretely in 1959, according to O'Kelly, when Land Project drainage operations near the railway brought them to light. Whether the railway construction decades earlier had already disturbed some of them is not recorded.