These are fulachtaí fia, a type of ancient outdoor cooking monument found across Ireland, typically consisting of a trough for heating water, a mound of fire-cracked stone, and evidence of repeated, organised use. They tend to cluster near water sources, which makes their presence in this boggy, stream-fed landscape entirely characteristic, even if the scale of the concentration here is quietly striking.

The stream running through the area appears on the earliest edition of the Ordnance Survey map, cutting through what is described as marshy terrain. By the 1900 revision, a railway line running north-east to south-west had been cut across the same ground, rearranging the landscape considerably. It was near this railway that the sites first came properly to light: O'Kelly, writing in 1969, recorded that fulachtaí fia were uncovered here in 1959 during Land Project drainage operations. A separate record by Prendergast from 1955 had already noted the townland as significant, listing it among fulacht fia sites in County Kilkenny and identifying at least six individual sites within Sraghgaddy. The two accounts together suggest a cluster that was both known and elusive, surfacing only when drainage works disturbed the ground that had long concealed it. All six sites have been assigned individual reference numbers, but none has been precisely located on the ground.