Wedge tombs are the most numerous class of megalithic tomb in Ireland, gallery-style burial chambers built from large upright stones and roofed with heavy capstones, typically wider and higher at one end and tapering toward the other, which gives the type its name. They were generally oriented with the broader entrance facing west or south-west, toward the setting sun, a pattern repeated consistently enough across hundreds of examples to suggest it was deliberate rather than incidental.

The principal scholarly record for this site comes from Ruaidhrí de Valera and Seán Ó Nualláin, whose survey of the megalithic tombs of County Mayo was published in 1964 as the second volume of their landmark multi-county study. De Valera and Ó Nualláin spent years systematically cataloguing and describing these monuments across Ireland, and their work remains a foundational reference for understanding the distribution and condition of tombs like the one at Doonty. Mayo has a considerable concentration of megalithic monuments, a reflection both of the county's early prehistoric settlement and of the degree to which its upland and marginal landscapes have preserved features that more intensively farmed ground has swallowed.