Wedge tombs, so called because their gallery is typically wider and higher at the entrance end and tapers toward the back, are broadly dated to the late Neolithic and early Bronze Age, somewhere in the range of 2500 to 2000 BC. They tend to face broadly westward, toward the setting sun, a pattern consistent enough across the type to suggest deliberate, culturally significant orientation rather than accident or convenience.

The principal scholarly record for this tomb comes from Ruaidhrí de Valera and Seán Ó Nualláin, whose Survey of the Megalithic Tombs of Ireland, Volume I, published in Dublin in 1961, systematically catalogued the megalithic monuments of County Clare. De Valera in particular spent decades working through the field evidence for these structures, and the Clare volume remains a foundational reference for anyone approaching the county's prehistoric monuments. Clare was the focus of that first volume partly because of how many wedge tombs survive there, many of them in the Burren region to the north, where the thin limestone soil and sparse later settlement left monuments relatively undisturbed.