Court tombs are among the oldest megalithic structures on the island, typically dating to around 4000 BCE or earlier, and they take their name from a defining architectural feature: an unroofed, semicircular or oval forecourt of standing stones that opens onto one or more roofed burial galleries. The courts are thought to have functioned as ceremonial spaces, places where the living gathered to engage with the dead, though the precise rituals involved remain a matter of interpretation.

The principal scholarly record for this monument comes from Ruaidhrí de Valera and Seán Ó Nualláin, whose Survey of the Megalithic Tombs of Ireland, Volume II, covering County Mayo, was published in Dublin in 1964. De Valera and Ó Nualláin spent years systematically cataloguing these structures across the country, and their Mayo volume remains a foundational reference for the county's prehistoric landscape. Court tombs in Mayo are not uncommon in the broader sense, as the county contains a notable concentration of them, but each site carries its own condition, orientation, and degree of survival. Without the specific measurements and descriptions recorded in that survey, the particulars of the Aghaleague example, its current state, the number of surviving orthostats, or whether the court itself remains legible in the field, are difficult to reconstruct with confidence.