Stone circles, broadly speaking, belong to the Bronze Age in Ireland, erected roughly between 2500 and 500 BC, and they appear with particular frequency in the western counties, where the boggy, acidic ground has sometimes preserved what tillage elsewhere destroyed. Mayo has a scattering of such monuments, many of them modest in scale, sitting quietly in farmland or on hillside margins without so much as a signpost.

The name An Geata Mór translates from Irish as the big gate, a placename that carries its own low-key strangeness alongside a prehistoric monument. Beyond the location and the classification, documented detail about this particular circle remains sparse for the time being, which places it in the company of many Irish field monuments that are known to exist, recorded on the landscape, but not yet fully described in any publicly accessible form.