A cist is a small stone-lined box, typically constructed from thin slabs of rock, and used during the Bronze Age to contain the remains of the dead, sometimes accompanied by a ceramic vessel or a few personal objects. They are humble in scale but carry considerable weight as evidence of how early farming communities in Ireland treated their deceased.

The place name Tóin An Mhása is Irish, and like many townland names in Mayo it preserves a older layer of description rooted in the physical character of the land, though the precise local history of this particular monument remains unrecorded in publicly available sources. Mayo has a dense concentration of prehistoric remains, shaped in part by the county's geology and by the long history of human settlement along its Atlantic fringe. Cist burials in the region generally date to the Early Bronze Age, roughly 2500 to 1500 BCE, a period when individual or small-group inhumation and cremation were the dominant funerary practices across much of Ireland.