Recently stacked metamaterial structures coupled to a conductive plane have been investigated and have been shown to exhibit the same properties as stacked structures with double the layers, due to dipole mirror coupling. Here we study a system of stacked subwavelength metallic grating layers coupled to a metal film and show that this system not only supports the localized modes of a doubly layered structure, but also, for non-normal incidence, supports modes that exhibit a clear propagation and in one case a simultaneous localization of the electromagnetic field in the region between the metal film and the first grating layer. Furthermore we show that this hybridized propagating mode, excited for any N number of periodic layers, is further influenced as it couples with the highest energy localized mode of the periodic layered stack. Additionally it is found that the localized modes of the structure can be spectrally positioned in a directly adjacent manner, resulting in wideband absorption that can effectively be tuned by varying the grating film spacing. © 2012 Copyright Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE).