Wedge tombs get their name from their distinctive shape: the burial gallery is wider and taller at the western or south-western end, tapering as it runs eastward, the whole structure roofed with large capstones and typically enclosed within a cairn of smaller stones. They belong broadly to the late Neolithic and early Bronze Age, a period spanning roughly 2500 to 2000 BC, and Clare has an unusually dense concentration of them, making the county something of a focal point for anyone trying to understand how and why these monuments were distributed across the landscape.

The primary 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. That volume remains a foundational reference for megalithic studies in the region, systematically cataloguing the structural details, orientations, and conditions of tombs that had often gone unrecorded or been only loosely described in earlier antiquarian literature. De Valera in particular spent decades walking Clare's fields and uplands to produce this work, and the Fahy tomb is among the sites he and Ó Nualláin documented as part of that effort.