Locally called a cromlech, a catch-all term once applied to almost any grouping of ancient standing or leaning stones, the structure at Ballyhickey is more precisely a wedge tomb, the most numerous category of megalithic burial monument in Ireland. Wedge tombs take their name from their characteristic shape: a roofed gallery that narrows and lowers from one end to the other, typically oriented with the wider, taller end facing broadly west or south-west. They date generally to the late Neolithic and early Bronze Age, somewhere in the range of four to five thousand years ago, built by farming communities who left no written record of their intentions.

The Ballyhickey example was documented by Ruaidhrí de Valera and Seán Ó Nualláin in their Survey of the Megalithic Tombs of Ireland, Volume I, covering County Clare, published by the Stationery Office in Dublin in 1961. That volume remains a foundational reference for anyone trying to make sense of Clare's considerable concentration of prehistoric monuments. The tomb is a national monument in state care, recorded as number 484, which affords it a degree of formal protection without necessarily making it easy to find or widely visited.