Wedge tombs, so called because their burial galleries taper in both height and width from front to back, are the most numerous type of megalithic tomb in Ireland, yet each individual example carries its own particular character shaped by the stones available locally and the hands that raised them.

The principal scholarly record for this tomb comes from Seán Ó Nualláin's Survey of the Megalithic Tombs of Ireland, Volume V, covering County Sligo, published by the Stationery Office in Dublin in 1989. Ó Nualláin's survey was a landmark effort to catalogue the megalithic monuments of Ireland county by county, and the Sligo volume brought together fieldwork on a county that is unusually dense in prehistoric funerary architecture, from the court tombs of the Ox Mountains to the passage tombs clustered around Knocknarea. Wedge tombs in general date broadly from around 2500 to 2000 BC, placing them at the transition between the Neolithic and the Bronze Age, and they are thought to have served as communal burial places, possibly also carrying ritual functions for the communities that built and used them.