Wedge tombs, so called because their burial chambers taper in both height and width from front to back, are the most numerous tomb type in the country and belong broadly to the later Neolithic and early Bronze Age, roughly four to five thousand years ago. The Burren's peculiar karst landscape, where bare rock pavement stretches between thin pockets of soil, has preserved these structures with unusual clarity; there was simply never much incentive to quarry or clear them away.

Parknabinnia itself sits within a townland whose name derives from the Irish, referring to the peak or pointed hill nearby. The wider Burren holds dozens of wedge tombs within a relatively compact area, and Parknabinnia is among those that benefit from the exposed, almost lunar quality of the terrain, where the capstones and orthostats, the large upright slabs forming the chamber walls, remain visible without the obscuring cover of dense vegetation that swallows similar monuments elsewhere in Ireland. The communities who built these tombs likely used them over extended periods, placing the cremated or inhumed remains of multiple individuals within the chamber, suggesting a relationship between the living, the dead, and particular patches of land that persisted across generations.