Court tombs, sometimes called court cairns, are Neolithic passage-style structures distinguished by a forecourt of upright stones that opens into one or more roofed burial galleries. They were built by farming communities who arrived in Ireland around 4000 BC, and they served as collective tombs, places where the dead were interred over generations rather than in a single act of burial.

The primary scholarly record for this site comes from the survey carried out by Ruaidhrí de Valera and Seán Ó Nualláin, published in 1964 as part of their systematic inventory of megalithic tombs across Ireland. That volume focused on County Mayo, a county that contains a remarkable concentration of Neolithic monument types, and it remains a foundational reference for understanding how these structures were distributed across the landscape. Court tombs are found predominantly in the northern half of Ireland, and Mayo contains a significant number of them, scattered across terrain that would have looked very different in the Neolithic period, before blanket bog spread across much of the west.