The passage tombs here are not the lone dramatic silhouettes that tend to dominate the popular imagination of prehistoric Ireland; they sit close together across open farmland, a gathering rather than a statement, which makes the complex feel genuinely strange to walk through. A passage tomb, in simple terms, consists of a burial chamber reached by a roofed corridor, the whole structure covered by a cairn of stone or earth. At Carrowmore, many of the monuments are unusually modest in scale compared to the great mounds elsewhere in the country, yet their density and their collective antiquity make the site remarkable.

The fullest account of the Carrowmore complex remains Seán Ó Nualláin's survey, published by the Stationery Office in Dublin in 1989 as the fifth volume of his Survey of the Megalithic Tombs of Ireland, covering County Sligo. Ó Nualláin documented the individual monuments systematically at a time when the site's full extent and significance were still being absorbed by the wider archaeological community. The complex is a National Monument in State care, which has helped preserve what survives of a landscape that was more extensive still before centuries of agricultural clearance and stone robbing took their toll.