Court tombs, among the oldest megalithic monuments in Ireland, are defined by a distinctive semicircular or oval forecourt, formed from upright stones, which opens onto one or more roofed gallery chambers where the dead were placed. They date broadly to the fourth millennium BC, and Mayo has an unusually dense concentration of them, scattered across bogland and hillside that has, in many ways, preserved them through simple neglect.

The primary scholarly record for this tomb comes from Ruaidhrí de Valera and Seán Ó Nualláin, whose systematic survey of the megalithic tombs of Ireland, the second volume of which focused on County Mayo and was published in Dublin in 1964, remains a foundational document for understanding these monuments. De Valera and Ó Nualláin spent years cataloguing and measuring sites across the country, producing detailed plans and descriptions that recorded condition, orientation, and surviving structural elements. Their work brought monuments like the one at Glenulra into the formal archaeological record at a time when many such sites were still little known outside their immediate localities.