Wedge tombs take their name from their plan: a roofed gallery that narrows and lowers from front to back, typically oriented towards the west or south-west, in a pattern so consistent across hundreds of sites that it clearly reflects deliberate, shared belief rather than convenience.

The principal scholarly record for this site comes from Ruaidhrí de Valera and Seán Ó Nualláin, whose Survey of the Megalithic Tombs of Ireland, Volume I, published by the Stationery Office in Dublin in 1961, remains a foundational reference for Clare's prehistoric monuments. De Valera and Ó Nualláin systematically documented the county's megalithic remains at a time when many sites were poorly understood or recorded only in passing, and their work gave monuments like the Kilcurrish tomb a fixed place in the archaeological literature. Clare's concentration of wedge tombs is thought to reflect patterns of late Neolithic and early Bronze Age settlement, periods during which communities used these structures for communal burial and, quite possibly, territorial or ritual marking of the landscape.