Wedge tombs are the most numerous of Ireland's megalithic tomb types, gallery graves that taper in both height and width from front to back, and they belong broadly to the late Neolithic and early Bronze Age. This one occupies a county that has an unusually dense concentration of them, Clare being something of a heartland for the form.

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, covering County Clare, was published by the Stationery Office in Dublin in 1961. De Valera in particular devoted much of his academic career to cataloguing and interpreting these monuments, and the Clare volume remains a foundational reference for anyone working on the prehistoric landscape of the region. The townland name itself, Cragballyconoal, points to the layered linguistic sediment of rural Ireland, where anglicised Irish place-names often preserve older territorial or descriptive information that the landscape itself no longer makes obvious.