This particular structure, recorded as Petrie tomb No. 1, is a passage tomb, a type of monument in which a stone-lined corridor leads inward to a central burial chamber, the whole arrangement typically covered by a cairn of earth and rubble. The passage tomb form is associated across Ireland and Atlantic Europe with communities who buried their dead communally, often returning to the same chamber across generations, and who aligned their monuments with solar events in ways that suggest careful, sustained observation of the sky.

The site takes its designation from George Petrie, the nineteenth-century antiquarian whose surveys gave early systematic attention to Irish megalithic monuments, and whose numbering system left a documentary trail still used by later scholars. The fullest published treatment of this tomb appears in Seán Ó Nualláin's survey of the megalithic tombs of County Sligo, published in 1989 as the fifth volume of a national inventory. Carrowmore as a complex is now understood to include some of the earliest megalithic construction in Ireland, with dates from excavated tombs pushing back into the fifth millennium BC, placing the cemetery among the oldest of its kind anywhere in Europe. The concentration of monuments here, spread across a low limestone plateau, has led archaeologists to interpret Carrowmore not as a scattering of isolated burials but as a coherent ritual landscape, possibly organised around the now-largely-destroyed central cairn of Listoghil.