Wedge tombs, so called because their chambers taper in both height and width from front to back, are the most numerous type of megalithic tomb in Ireland, yet individual examples outside the well-known clusters rarely receive much notice. The Dunowla example is one of these quieter sites, present in the landscape without ceremony.

The principal scholarly record for this tomb comes 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 county-by-county survey remains a foundational reference for understanding the distribution and structural variation of megalithic monuments across Ireland, and the Sligo volume in particular documents a county with a remarkable concentration of prehistoric funerary architecture. Wedge tombs as a class are generally associated with the later Neolithic and into the Early Bronze Age, broadly the third millennium BC, and are thought to reflect communities with connections to Atlantic Europe, given how heavily they cluster along Ireland's western seaboard.