That alone makes it an unusual case. Megalithic monuments, a broad category covering everything from portal tombs and court cairns to standing stones and wedge tombs, were typically raised during the Neolithic or early Bronze Age, somewhere between roughly 4000 and 1500 BC. They are among the oldest built things in Ireland, and the west of Galway has no shortage of them, scattered across bogland and coastal headlands in varying states of survival and scholarly attention.

Aughrus More sits on the Aughrus Peninsula, a low-lying finger of land pushing westward into the Atlantic between Clifden Bay to the south and Ballynakill Harbour to the north. The landscape here is one of thin soils over rock, with the sea rarely out of sight or earshot. That a megalithic structure survives in this location is not surprising in itself; the peninsula and its surrounds have been inhabited since prehistory. What remains less clear, at least from what is currently available, is the specific form this particular monument takes, its dimensions, its orientation, and the degree to which it is intact. These are precisely the kinds of details that distinguish one megalithic site from another and that give a monument its individual character.