A passage tomb is precisely what its name suggests: a burial chamber reached by a stone-lined corridor, the whole thing typically covered by a cairn of loose stones or a mound of earth. What makes such monuments remarkable is not simply their age but the deliberate, communal effort they represent, the quarrying and hauling of enormous stones, the alignment of chambers, the repeated use of these places across generations.

The Sligo landscape is unusually dense with this kind of monument. The county is dominated by the great passage tomb cemetery on the Carrowmore plain and the enormous cairn of Knocknarea nearby, and Tobernaveen sits within this broader tradition of Neolithic activity in the region. The site is catalogued in Seán Ó Nualláin's Survey of the Megalithic Tombs of Ireland, Volume V, covering County Sligo, published by the Stationery Office in Dublin in 1989, which remains the principal scholarly record for monuments of this type across the county. The tomb carries National Monument status, designated as No. 153, placing it under State protection alongside the more widely visited sites that draw attention to this corner of the west of Ireland.

Beyond its protected status and its place in Ó Nualláin's survey, detailed description of the monument's current condition, its surviving structural elements, or the practicalities of visiting it are not easily come by without consulting the primary record directly. What can be said is that Tobernaveen represents a quieter node in a landscape where the Neolithic is unusually legible, a place where the same communities who shaped Carrowmore also left their mark, if in a way that history has treated with rather less fanfare.