The sites belong to a type of monument known as a fulacht fia, essentially a prehistoric outdoor cooking place, typically consisting of a trough dug into the ground, a mound of fire-cracked stones, and a hearth. Water would be brought to the boil by dropping heated stones directly into the trough. They are found in their thousands across Ireland, usually in low-lying, wet ground near a water source, and Sraghgaddy fits that pattern precisely.

The first edition Ordnance Survey map shows the area as marshy terrain with a stream running roughly north-west to south-east through it. By the 1900 revision, a railway line had been cut through the same ground on a north-east to south-west axis, slicing across a landscape that had already been quietly significant for millennia. The sites came to wider attention in stages. Prendergast, writing in 1955, listed Shraghgaddy townland in the barony of Gowran among fulacht fia locations recorded that year in County Kilkenny, noting at least six sites. A few years later, O'Kelly, writing in 1969, recorded that fulachta fiadh had been uncovered here in 1959 near the railway during Land Project drainage operations. That the drainage work was what exposed them is telling: this kind of monument tends to survive precisely because the waterlogged ground that made it useful in the first place also discouraged later disturbance. The six sites were assigned individual reference numbers but have not been individually located on the ground, meaning the cluster as a whole is acknowledged while each component remains, for now, unresolved.