Court tombs, sometimes called lobster-claw tombs for the curved forecourt of upright stones that opens at one end, were built by Neolithic farming communities roughly five to six thousand years ago. The roofed gallery behind the court served as a place of collective burial, and the open forecourt is thought to have functioned as a ceremonial space, perhaps for rituals connected with the dead. They are among the earliest monuments in the country, predating the pyramids of Egypt by well over a millennium.

The principal published account of this monument appears in Seán Ó Nualláin's survey of the megalithic tombs of County Sligo, published in 1989 as the fifth volume in a national inventory of such structures. Ó Nualláin's work remains the standard reference for this class of monument across Ireland, documenting the condition, dimensions, and setting of individual tombs county by county. Sligo is unusually well furnished with megalithic remains, and a court tomb at Formoyle would have been one of many catalogued sites in that volume, each representing a community that chose to invest considerable collective effort in raising large stones to mark the presence of their dead in the landscape.