Court tombs, sometimes called horned cairns, are Neolithic communal burial structures characterised by an open, roughly semicircular forecourt at one end, leading into a roofed gallery divided into chambers. They represent some of the earliest monumental architecture in Ireland, dating broadly to the fourth millennium BC, and Sligo holds a remarkable concentration of them.

The principal scholarly record for this tomb comes from Seán Ó Nualláin's survey of the megalithic tombs of County Sligo, published in 1989 as the fifth volume in a national survey series. Ó Nualláin's work catalogued the county's extraordinary density of megalithic monuments, which includes not only court tombs but passage tombs, portal tombs, and wedge tombs scattered across its hills, drumlin country, and coastal margins. The Tanrego example is part of that broader pattern, a remnant of a Neolithic farming population that quarried, moved, and raised large stones in acts of communal effort whose precise ritual meaning remains a matter of interpretation rather than certainty.