Court tombs, sometimes called court cairns, are Neolithic in origin, typically dating to around 4000 BCE or earlier, and they take their name from the open, often semicircular or oval forecourt that precedes the burial chambers. This forecourt is thought to have served a ceremonial function, a gathering space of sorts, set before the roofed gallery where the dead were interred. That a structure conceived somewhere in the fourth or fifth millennium BCE should still be legible in the Mayo countryside, even partially, is not something to pass over lightly.

The tomb at An Bheithigh is documented in the landmark survey carried out by Ruaidhrí de Valera and Seán Ó Nualláin, published in 1964 as the second volume of their Survey of the Megalithic Tombs of Ireland, which dealt specifically with County Mayo. De Valera and Ó Nualláin undertook systematic fieldwork across the county, recording the condition, orientation, and structural details of tombs that had often been neglected or misidentified. Mayo has one of the higher concentrations of court tombs in Ireland, a fact connected to patterns of Neolithic settlement along the western seaboard, where communities farmed and buried their dead across a landscape that was then considerably more wooded than it appears today. The work of de Valera and Ó Nualláin gave many of these sites their first rigorous modern description and remains a foundational reference for anyone working on Irish prehistory.