It is the kind of folkloric label that suggests something vast and flat and scorched, something left behind by a being too large to be entirely believed in. The monument at Tawnatruffaun in County Sligo carries that name into the present, though the structure beneath the label is considerably older than any story told about it. It belongs to the tradition of megalithic tomb building that shaped the Irish landscape during the Neolithic period, roughly five to six thousand years ago, when communities across the island raised elaborate stone monuments for the burial and commemoration of their dead.

The primary scholarly record for this site comes from Seán Ó Nualláin's Survey of the Megalithic Tombs of Ireland, Volume V, covering County Sligo, published by the Stationery Office in Dublin in 1989. Ó Nualláin's survey was a landmark work of Irish archaeological documentation, systematically cataloguing the megalithic monuments of the west and north-west, and County Sligo proved especially rich territory. The county contains some of the most concentrated and varied megalithic landscapes in Europe, from the court tombs of the valleys to the passage tombs clustered on hilltops like those at Carrowkeel and Knocknarea. Where exactly the Giants Griddle fits within Ó Nualláin's typology, and what survives of its original form, is detail that the survey itself would settle, though the name suggests a monument with some horizontal spread, perhaps a collapsed or partially ruined structure whose remaining stones, seen from a certain angle, might once have prompted the comparison to a cooking surface used by something enormous.