Court tombs take their name from a distinctive feature: an open, roughly semicircular or oval forecourt formed by tall standing stones, which leads into one or more roofed burial chambers. They are found almost exclusively in the northern half of Ireland, and Mayo has a notable concentration of them, scattered across bogland and hillside in various states of preservation.

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 by the Stationery Office in Dublin in 1964. That survey remains a foundational work in Irish prehistory, cataloguing the structural details, orientations, and conditions of megalithic monuments across the county at the time of recording. De Valera in particular devoted much of his academic career to understanding the distribution and typology of court tombs, and the Mayo volume represents a careful fieldwork effort to document monuments that, in many cases, had never been formally recorded before.