Court tombs take their name from the open, roughly semicircular forecourt of upright stones that leads into a roofed burial gallery. They are among the earliest megalithic structures built in Ireland, and Mayo has a notable concentration of them, scattered across townlands whose names have long outlasted any memory of the people who raised the stones.

The tomb at Creggaun is documented in the foundational survey of this monument type carried out by Ruaidhrí de Valera and Seán Ó Nualláin, whose two-volume study of Mayo's megalithic tombs, published by the Stationery Office in Dublin in 1964, remains a key reference for the county's prehistoric monuments. De Valera and Ó Nualláin systematically recorded the surviving court tombs of Ireland across several volumes, working through the evidence county by county at a time when many sites had received little or no formal attention. Their Mayo volume brought together field observations, measurements, and comparisons that placed individual tombs like this one within the broader pattern of Neolithic burial and ritual practice across the west of Ireland.