Wedge tombs, built during the late Neolithic and into the early Bronze Age, take their name from their characteristic shape: a roofed gallery that narrows and lowers from front to back, typically oriented to face the setting sun in the west or south-west. They are the most recent of the main megalithic traditions in Ireland, yet they remain among the least discussed, quietly occupying farmland and upland margins across the western counties.

The primary scholarly record for this tomb comes from Ruaidhrí de Valera and Seán Ó Nualláin's Survey of the Megalithic Tombs of Ireland, the first volume of which dealt specifically with County Clare and was published in 1961. De Valera in particular spent years systematically cataloguing and classifying these monuments at a time when many were poorly understood or lumped together under vague categories. Their work established the wedge tomb as a distinct type and placed Clare at the centre of any serious study of the tradition, given how densely the county's landscape is scattered with these structures. The Leana example forms part of that broader Clare assemblage documented in their survey.