Wedge tombs, so called because their gallery narrows and lowers from front to back in a wedge-like profile, are the most numerous of Ireland's megalithic tomb types and are particularly concentrated in the west of the country. They date broadly to the late Neolithic and early Bronze Age, roughly four to five thousand years ago, and were used as collective burial places, their dead interred within a stone-lined chamber and covered by a cairn of smaller stones.

The Ballykelly example is documented in the foundational survey carried out by Ruaidhrí de Valera and Seán Ó Nualláin, whose volume on County Clare, published by the Stationery Office in Dublin in 1961, remains the primary reference for megalithic monuments in the region. De Valera in particular devoted much of his career to cataloguing and analysing wedge tombs across Ireland, and Clare, with its limestone karst terrain and long tradition of prehistoric settlement, yielded a significant number of examples. The county's geology, which shapes the bare, rocky fields of the Burren and the wider region, lent itself both to the survival of surface monuments and to the communities who once quarried and raised the large slabs that form such structures.