Wedge tombs, so called because of their characteristic tapering plan, wider and taller at the entrance end and narrowing toward the back, are the most numerous class of megalithic tomb in Ireland, and most of them cluster in the western provinces. They belong broadly to the late Neolithic and early Bronze Age, a period when communities were burying their dead in stone-built chambers covered by cairns and oriented, in most cases, toward the south-west.

The principal scholarly record for this monument comes from Seán Ó Nualláin's survey of the megalithic tombs of County Sligo, published in 1989 as the fifth volume in a national series. Ó Nualláin's work brought together systematic fieldwork across the county, documenting the condition, dimensions, and setting of each tomb and situating individual sites within the broader distribution of the monument type. Sligo is particularly well furnished with megalithic remains, and the Carrownrush tomb is one of several wedge tombs recorded in the county that have not achieved the wider recognition of more visited sites elsewhere in Connacht.