Wedge tombs, so called because their burial chambers taper in both height and width from front to back, were constructed during the late Neolithic and into the early Bronze Age, roughly between 2500 and 2000 BC. They are found in their greatest concentrations along the Atlantic seaboard, and Sligo, with its layered prehistoric landscape, holds a notable share of them.

The Lugdoon example is documented in 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 one of the foundational works for understanding the distribution and structural variety of Ireland's megalithic monuments, and the Sligo volume in particular maps a county exceptionally dense with prehistoric remains. Wedge tombs in this region were likely used for collective burial, possibly with ritual or territorial significance for the farming communities who built them, though the specifics of how and by whom any individual tomb was used are rarely recoverable from the archaeological record alone.