Court tombs take their name from an unroofed ceremonial forecourt, usually a semi-circular or full-oval space defined by standing stones, which leads into one or more roofed gallery chambers where the dead were placed. They are among the earliest examples of communal architecture in Ireland, built by farming communities who had only recently arrived on the island, and they cluster most densely across the northern half of the country, making Mayo one of their heartlands.

The primary scholarly record for this tomb comes from Ruaidhrí de Valera and Seán Ó Nualláin, whose meticulous county-by-county survey of megalithic tombs, published by the Stationery Office in Dublin in 1964, remains a foundational reference for Irish prehistoric archaeology. De Valera in particular devoted much of his career to cataloguing and classifying these monuments, establishing the typological distinctions between court tombs, portal tombs, passage tombs, and wedge tombs that archaeologists still work with today. The Cappagh example was recorded as part of that Volume II survey covering County Mayo, placing it within a broader landscape of Neolithic activity across the county.