Wedge tombs, so called because their gallery is typically wider and higher at the entrance end and tapers toward the back, are generally dated to the late Neolithic and early Bronze Age, roughly 2500 to 2000 BC. They tend to face broadly south-west, a pattern consistent enough across the country to suggest it was deliberate, though whether this orientation had ritual, astronomical, or practical significance remains a matter of debate among archaeologists.

The principal record of this monument derives from 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 systematic county-by-county effort to document Ireland's megalithic heritage at a time when many such sites were poorly recorded or at risk of being overlooked entirely. Sligo is unusually rich in prehistoric monuments, a fact long associated with the county's limestone landscapes and the communities that worked them thousands of years ago. Wedge tombs in the west of Ireland often survive in upland or marginal areas, landscapes that were farmed intensively in the Neolithic but later abandoned, which is part of the reason the stones were left largely undisturbed.