What makes it persistently arresting is not any single monument but the cumulative effect of so many passage tombs arranged across the landscape in loose proximity, each one a circle of boulders surrounding a dolmen-like central chamber. A passage tomb, to distinguish it from other megalithic forms, is a burial monument in which a stone-lined corridor leads to one or more chambers, the whole structure originally covered by a cairn or earthen mound. At Carrowmore the mounds have largely disappeared over millennia, leaving the skeletal stonework exposed and oddly readable, like diagrams of themselves.

The site has been catalogued and studied in detail by Seán Ó Nualláin, whose survey of the megalithic tombs of County Sligo, published in 1989 as part of a national series, remains a foundational reference for the complex. The tomb recorded here, designated National Monument No. 153, is one among many in the Carrowmore grouping, which clusters around the base of Knocknarea, the hill to the west capped by the unexcavated cairn traditionally associated with the legendary queen Méabh. The relationship between the low-lying passage tombs at Carrowmore and the dominant mass of Knocknarea above them has long interested archaeologists, with the elevated cairn appearing almost to preside over the field of smaller monuments below. Radiocarbon dates from excavations at Carrowmore have pushed some of the tombs back to the fifth millennium BC, which would make parts of the complex older than Newgrange by a considerable margin, though the dating has not been without scholarly debate.