Wedge tombs are the most numerous class of megalithic monument on the island, built during the late Neolithic and into the early Bronze Age, roughly between 2500 and 2000 BC. The name describes their basic form: a roofed gallery of large upright stones, typically narrowing and lowering toward the rear, and generally oriented with the wider, taller entrance facing west or south-west. They were burial monuments, though the communities that raised them almost certainly understood them as something more than that, perhaps as permanent markers of territory or ancestral connection to particular ground.

Devlin is a quiet townland, and this particular tomb has attracted little published attention, which is not unusual for Mayo. The county contains a remarkable concentration of prehistoric monuments, many of them poorly documented, sitting in bog or rough pasture far from any road that would bring casual visitors past them. The western orientation of wedge tombs has long interested researchers because it aligns the entrance with the setting sun, suggesting the builders held some deliberate cosmological intention, though what exactly they believed remains a matter of inference rather than record.