Court tombs, sometimes called court cairns, are among the oldest megalithic monuments in Ireland, built by Neolithic communities roughly five to six thousand years ago. The defining feature is an open, semicircular or oval forecourt formed by upright stones, leading into one or more roofed burial chambers. The arrangement was almost certainly as much about ceremony and communal ritual as it was about housing the dead.

The Aghoo tomb is documented in the foundational survey of this monument type carried out by Ruaidhrí de Valera and Seán Ó Nualláin, whose Volume II of the Survey of the Megalithic Tombs of Ireland, published in Dublin in 1964, concentrated specifically on County Mayo. That volume remains a key reference for anyone trying to understand the distribution and condition of these monuments across the county. Mayo has a notable concentration of court tombs, and the de Valera and Ó Nualláin survey brought many of them, including the one at Aghoo, into systematic record for the first time, giving researchers a baseline against which later fieldwork could be measured.