Wedge tombs take their name from their characteristic shape: a gallery that narrows and lowers from front to back, typically aligned with the wider end facing roughly south-west. They belong to the late Neolithic and early Bronze Age, a period stretching back somewhere between four and five thousand years, and they are found in their greatest concentrations in the west of Ireland, where the landscape around them has changed far more slowly than in more heavily developed parts of the country.

The primary scholarly reference for this tomb is the survey conducted by Ruaidhrí de Valera and Seán Ó Nualláin, published in 1964 as part of their systematic catalogue of megalithic tombs across Ireland, with the second volume covering County Mayo specifically. De Valera and Ó Nualláin spent years travelling and recording these monuments at a time when many were still poorly documented, and their work remains a foundational resource for understanding the distribution and form of prehistoric funerary architecture across the island. County Mayo proved particularly rich territory, with wedge tombs scattered across its uplands and boglands, many of them well preserved precisely because the ground around them was never intensively farmed or built upon.