A passage tomb is exactly what the name suggests: a burial chamber reached by a stone-lined corridor, the whole structure typically covered by a mound of earth or cairn. What makes Carrowmore unusual as a complex is the sheer density of monuments gathered in a relatively compact area of drumlin landscape, suggesting this was a place of sustained and deliberate ritual importance over a very long period of prehistory.

This particular tomb carries the designation given to it by George Petrie, the nineteenth-century antiquarian whose numbering system became a working shorthand for cataloguing the Carrowmore monuments before more systematic surveys followed. The authoritative modern account comes from Seán Ó Nualláin, whose volume on County Sligo formed part of the comprehensive Survey of the Megalithic Tombs of Ireland, published by the Stationery Office in Dublin in 1989. That survey placed Carrowmore's tombs within a broader national framework and gave each monument its detailed structural description. The tomb is a National Monument in State care, which offers it a degree of formal protection within the Irish heritage system.