Wedge tombs are the most numerous class of megalithic tomb found in Ireland, named for the way their burial gallery tapers in both height and width from front to back, like a stone wedge pressed into the earth. They date broadly to the Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age, roughly 2500 to 2000 BC, and their distribution across the western counties of Ireland suggests a population that was farming the landscape and marking it with collective monuments to the dead.

The Kilsellagh tomb is documented in Seán Ó Nualláin's survey of the megalithic tombs of County Sligo, published in 1989 as the fifth volume in a national survey series. Ó Nualláin's work remains the primary systematic record of Sligo's prehistoric stone monuments, cataloguing their dimensions, orientations, and states of preservation across the county. Sligo as a whole is unusually rich in megalithic remains, partly owing to its geology and partly to patterns of land use that left many upland and marginal areas relatively undisturbed over the centuries. The county is better known internationally for the passage tomb complex at Carrowmore and the great cairn of Knocknarea, but wedge tombs like the one at Kilsellagh represent a different funerary tradition, less architecturally elaborate but no less deliberate in its construction and placement within the landscape.