Megalithic tombs are communal burial structures built from large stones, typically erected by farming communities in Ireland between roughly 4000 and 2000 BC, and they take several distinct forms across the island, including court tombs, portal tombs, and passage tombs.

The primary scholarly record for this site comes from Seán Ó Nualláin's Survey of the Megalithic Tombs of Ireland, Volume V, covering County Sligo, published by the Stationery Office in Dublin in 1989. Ó Nualláin's county-by-county survey remains one of the foundational works in Irish prehistoric archaeology, systematically cataloguing monuments that might otherwise exist only as local knowledge or unmarked field features. Sligo was afforded its own dedicated volume in part because of the extraordinary concentration of megalithic structures in the county, from the well-known passage tomb complex at Carrowmore to smaller, less-visited sites scattered across the drumlin and limestone countryside. Barnacoghil falls into that latter category, a site documented within a wider scholarly project rather than one that has attracted independent study or popular attention.