A fulacht fia (sometimes rendered fulacht fiadh) is a burnt mound, typically found near water, and associated with the heating of liquid by dropping fire-cracked stones into a trough. They are Bronze Age in the main, though their precise function has been debated, with cooking, bathing, and textile processing all proposed. What makes the Sraghgaddy group quietly striking is simply the number of them gathered in one marshy patch of ground.

The earliest Ordnance Survey mapping of the area records it as boggy terrain with a stream running roughly northwest to southeast, exactly the kind of low-lying, wet environment where fulachta fia characteristically occur. By the time of the 1900 revision, a railway line had cut across the site running northeast to southwest, and it was near this line that the monuments came to light. During Land Project drainage operations in 1959, fulachta fiadh were uncovered in the area, as noted by the archaeologist M. J. O'Kelly. A separate record from 1955, compiled by Prendergast, had already listed the Sraghgaddy townland in Gowran barony as containing at least six such sites. Despite all this documentation, the individual monuments have not been precisely located on the ground. A circular mound of around 25 metres in diameter is visible in satellite imagery of the area, and this may represent one of the six, though it has not been confirmed through excavation or survey.