Court tombs, sometimes called court cairns, are megalithic structures characterised by an open semicircular or U-shaped forecourt of upright stones leading into one or more roofed burial galleries. They belong broadly to a tradition of communal burial and ritual that flourished in Ireland roughly five to six thousand years ago, and Mayo contains a particularly notable concentration of them.

The primary scholarly record for this monument comes from Ruaidhrí de Valera and Seán Ó Nualláin, whose Survey of the Megalithic Tombs of Ireland, Volume II, covering County Mayo, was published by the Stationery Office in Dublin in 1964. That volume remains a foundational work in Irish megalithic studies, systematically documenting the county's surviving prehistoric monuments at a time when many were still relatively unstudied. De Valera in particular devoted much of his career to understanding the distribution and typology of court tombs, arguing that their concentration in the north and west of Ireland reflected ancient patterns of Neolithic settlement and movement. The Creevagh More example forms part of that broader picture, a single monument within a landscape that was, in prehistoric terms, surprisingly well populated and carefully organised around the rituals of the dead.