Court tombs, sometimes called horned cairns, are passage-style megalithic structures distinguished by a semicircular or oval forecourt of upright stones at their entrance, thought to have served as a focal point for communal ritual before the roofed gallery where the dead were placed. They are among the earliest monumental constructions in Ireland, generally dated to around 4000 BCE or earlier.

The primary scholarly record for this structure 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 survey was a systematic county-by-county documentation of Ireland's megalithic heritage, and his Sligo volume brought together fieldwork on the remarkable concentration of prehistoric monuments in that county, a landscape already famous for the Carrowmore and Carrowkeel tomb complexes. County Sligo has one of the densest clusters of megalithic tombs in Ireland, a fact that reflects both the agricultural potential of the region in prehistoric times and, perhaps, particular local traditions of monument-building that persisted across generations.