Court tombs are among Ireland's oldest megalithic monuments, typically consisting of an open semicircular or oval forecourt made of upright stones, leading into one or more roofed gallery chambers where the dead were placed. They are concentrated in the north and west of Ireland, and Mayo has a particularly dense scattering of them, though many remain little visited.

The principal scholarly record for this tomb comes from Ruaidhrí de Valera and Seán Ó Nualláin, whose Survey of the Megalithic Tombs of Ireland, Volume II, covering County Mayo, was published in Dublin in 1964. De Valera and Ó Nualláin spent years systematically cataloguing these monuments across the country, and their Mayo volume remains the foundational reference for the county's prehistoric funerary landscape. The work brought rigorous documentation to sites that had often existed only in local memory or passed unrecorded in the wider literature. Glenulra is one of many townlands in Mayo where the evidence of Neolithic burial practice persists in stone above ground, a form of monument that was already ancient when the first written records in Ireland were being made.