The word has largely fallen out of formal archaeological use, but it lingers in place names and older surveys as a reminder of how these structures were understood before modern classification took hold.

The principal scholarly record for these monuments 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. De Valera and Ó Nualláin spent decades systematically documenting megalithic tombs across Ireland, and their Mayo volume remains a foundational reference for the county's prehistoric burial monuments. Mayo has a notable concentration of megalithic remains, including court tombs, portal tombs, and wedge tombs, structures built during the Neolithic and into the early Bronze Age by farming communities who had cleared much of the woodland that then covered the landscape. The Doonanarroo cromlechs fall within this broader tradition of monument building, though the specific details of their form, condition, and arrangement are recorded in the de Valera and Ó Nualláin survey rather than in more recent documentation.