Wedge tombs, so called because their roofed stone galleries taper in both height and width from front to back, belong to the late Neolithic and early Bronze Age, a period roughly spanning 2500 to 2000 BC. They are the most numerous megalithic tomb type found in Ireland, yet individually they tend to sit unannounced in fields and on hillsides, unmarked and largely unvisited.

The Harefield example is documented in Ruaidhrí de Valera and Seán Ó Nualláin's Survey of the Megalithic Tombs of Ireland, Volume II, covering County Mayo, published by the Stationery Office in Dublin in 1964. That survey was a landmark piece of fieldwork, systematically cataloguing megalithic structures across the country at a time when many had received little formal scholarly attention. De Valera and Ó Nualláin's work remains a foundational reference for anyone trying to understand the distribution and character of these monuments across the west of Ireland, where wedge tombs cluster with particular density.