The word cromlech, from Welsh roots meaning curved or bent stone, was long used loosely by antiquarians to describe any arrangement of large upright stones, though it is now more precisely associated with portal tombs and similar megalithic structures. Whatever terminology one applies, these monuments were built to last, and the one at Drumgollagh has done exactly that, enduring in the Mayo landscape long after the society that raised it dissolved into the ground around it.

The principal scholarly record for this site comes from the landmark survey conducted by Ruaidhrí de Valera and Seán Ó Nualláin, whose second volume, covering County Mayo, was published by the Stationery Office in Dublin in 1964. That survey remains one of the foundational works in Irish prehistoric archaeology, systematically cataloguing the megalithic tombs of Ireland at a time when many such structures were poorly documented or at risk of being overlooked entirely. County Mayo proved to be exceptionally rich territory for the project, containing court tombs, portal tombs, and passage tombs spread across a landscape that has changed relatively little in some areas since the Neolithic period, roughly five to four thousand years before the present era.