Wedge tombs, so called because their burial galleries taper in both height and width from front to back, belong broadly to the late Neolithic and early Bronze Age, a period roughly spanning 2500 to 2000 BC. Clare has a particularly dense concentration of them, making the county something of a focal point for anyone trying to understand how these structures were distributed across the prehistoric landscape.

The principal scholarly record for this tomb comes from Ruaidhrí de Valera and Seán Ó Nualláin, whose Survey of the Megalithic Tombs of Ireland, Volume I, covering County Clare, was published by the Stationery Office in Dublin in 1961. De Valera and Ó Nualláin spent years systematically documenting Clare's megalithic monuments at a time when many were poorly recorded or known only through local tradition. Their work gave the Cappaghabaun Mountain tomb a formal place in the archaeological record, though the mountain itself remains well outside the circuits that draw visitors to the Burren's more celebrated megalithic sites further to the north.