The site is known as the Twelve Graves, and local tradition holds that the people buried here were killed by Cromwellian troops, their deaths leaving an impression on the landscape and on memory that has persisted across centuries.

The Cromwellian campaigns of the 1650s brought systematic and often brutal military action across Ireland, and communities in Wicklow were not spared. Rural hillside burials of this kind, outside consecrated ground, frequently point to circumstances that were sudden or violent, where the normal arrangements of parish burial simply were not possible. The twelve crosses now marking the terrace are described as recently erected, meaning the site has been the subject of active local commemoration rather than passive remembrance. That someone, presumably within the community, took the decision to place those crosses is itself part of the story, a quiet act of acknowledgement on a hillside that might otherwise show no outward sign of what happened there.