Wedge tombs, so called because their gallery is wider and taller at the entrance end and tapers toward the back, were built predominantly during the late Neolithic and early Bronze Age, somewhere between roughly 2500 and 2000 BC. They are found in their greatest concentrations along the western seaboard, where the Atlantic limestone and the rhythms of a pastoral farming culture seem to have shaped both their distribution and their orientation, most facing broadly west or south-west toward the setting sun.

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 II, covering County Mayo, was published by the Stationery Office in Dublin in 1964. That volume remains a foundational reference for the megalithic archaeology of the west of Ireland, cataloguing the county's tombs with a rigour that brought many poorly documented monuments into serious academic focus for the first time. De Valera in particular devoted much of his career to understanding the typology of Irish megalithic structures, and the wedge tomb category was central to his thinking about how funerary traditions spread and evolved across prehistoric Ireland.