These features are often medieval in origin, created by cutting into a slope or piling up earth to produce a flat, stable base for a house or farmstead, and they survive in the landscape long after any timber or stone structure above them has vanished entirely.

Grange itself sits in a stretch of Sligo that has been inhabited since prehistory, in the shadow of the Dartry Mountains and not far from the remarkable stone circle at Carrowmore and the great passage tomb complex on Knocknarea. Settlement platforms in this part of Ireland are frequently associated with the medieval Gaelic or Anglo-Norman countryside, where isolated homesteads and small agricultural clusters occupied marginal ground. The platform at Grange represents one such trace, a quiet earthwork that marks the fact that someone, at some point, chose this particular piece of ground to build a life on.