Rahoon is perhaps better known as the townland that inspired James Joyce, whose story "The Dead" ends with Gabriel Conroy brooding over the grave of Michael Furey in its cemetery. That literary association has tended to draw attention away from the older, stranger thing that also occupies this landscape, a prehistoric monument whose stones were being arranged long before the parish took its name.

Megalithic structures of this part of Connacht generally belong to the Neolithic or Bronze Age periods, roughly four to six thousand years ago, and can take several forms, from portal tombs and wedge tombs to standing stones and boulder burials. A wedge tomb, to give one example, is a roofed stone gallery, wider and taller at the entrance end and tapering toward the back, typically aligned to face the setting sun. Without more specific detail currently available about the Rahoon example, it is not possible to say with confidence which category this particular monument falls into, or what condition it is in. What is clear is that it has been identified and recorded as a megalithic structure, which is to say that human hands, at some considerable remove in time, deliberately raised or arranged large stones here for purposes that were almost certainly ceremonial or funerary.