Wedge tombs, so called because their gallery is wider and higher at the entrance end and tapers toward the back, were built during the late Neolithic and into the early Bronze Age, roughly between 2500 and 2000 BC, and Clare has an unusually dense concentration of them, owing in part to the open limestone terrain that both preserved them and made them visible to early surveyors.

The principal scholarly record for this tomb comes from the work of Ruaidhrí de Valera and Seán Ó Nualláin, whose survey of the megalithic tombs of County Clare was published in 1961 as the first volume of their broader national survey. De Valera was one of the foremost authorities on Irish megalithic architecture in the twentieth century, and his systematic fieldwork across Clare documented dozens of monuments that might otherwise have remained unrecorded or poorly understood. The Drumanure tomb forms part of that catalogue, its details set down as part of a sustained effort to map and describe the prehistoric funerary monuments scattered across the county's fields and hillsides.