Portal tombs, sometimes called dolmens, are among the oldest of Ireland's megalithic monument types, typically consisting of two tall upright portal stones supporting a large capstone, with a chamber behind intended for burial. What makes any such structure arresting, thousands of years after its construction, is the sheer ambition of the engineering: massive stones, shaped and raised without metal tools, arranged with a precision that has outlasted almost every other human effort of the same era.

The principal scholarly source for this site is 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. Ó Nualláin's survey was a landmark work of Irish archaeology, systematically cataloguing the distribution and condition of megalithic monuments across the country. Sligo is unusually rich in such monuments, partly owing to the county's landscape of limestone plains and low hills, which both preserved ancient structures and made the stone itself readily available to Neolithic communities. The concentration of megalithic activity in the broader region, which includes the passage tomb complex at Carrowmore a short distance away, suggests that this part of the west of Ireland was a place of considerable ceremonial significance over a long period of prehistory.