These are structures built thousands of years before written record, intended to house the dead and perhaps to mark territory or ancestry in a landscape that has since been stripped back to bog and stone.

The tomb at Glenulra is documented in the landmark academic survey conducted by Ruaidhrí de Valera and Seán Ó Nualláin, whose multi-volume Survey of the Megalithic Tombs of Ireland remains the foundational reference for this class of monument. The second volume, published by the Stationery Office in Dublin in 1964, covers County Mayo specifically, a county that holds a remarkable concentration of megalithic remains, including court tombs, portal tombs, and passage tombs, each representing a different tradition of Neolithic burial practice. Court tombs, the type most commonly found in Mayo, typically consist of a roofed gallery divided into burial chambers, fronted by a semicircular open forecourt formed by tall standing stones, where ritual activity is thought to have taken place. Without more detailed field notes it is not possible to say with certainty which type the Glenulra example represents, but its inclusion in de Valera and Ó Nualláin's survey places it within a recognised corpus of monuments that were systematically recorded and classified in the mid-twentieth century, many of them in varying states of collapse or overgrowth.