The townland is Dookinelly, and what survives there belongs to a tradition of megalithic burial that predates Christianity in Ireland by several thousand years. Megalithic tombs are monuments built from large stones, typically constructed during the Neolithic period, and they appear across the west of Ireland in considerable numbers, clustered in landscapes that their builders clearly regarded as significant, whether for ritual, territorial, or ancestral reasons.

The site at Dookinelly is documented in the foundational scholarly work on such monuments in the west of Ireland, the Survey of the Megalithic Tombs of Ireland, Volume II, covering County Mayo, compiled by Ruaidhrí de Valera and Seán Ó Nualláin and published in Dublin in 1964. That survey remains a key reference for understanding the distribution and character of megalithic structures across the county. Mayo has an unusually dense concentration of these monuments, particularly court tombs and portal tombs, which were communal burial structures often consisting of a stone-lined chamber approached by a forecourt or pair of upright portal stones. The informal name "pagan cemetery" reflects how local tradition often preserved a memory of such places as burial grounds, even when the precise nature or age of the monuments had long been forgotten.