Wedge tombs, so called because their roofed gallery is typically wider and higher at the entrance end and tapers toward the back, were built during the late Neolithic and into the Bronze Age, broadly between around 2500 and 2000 BC. They tend to face roughly west or south-west, a consistent orientation whose precise significance is still debated, and they are found in particularly high numbers across the Burren and the wider Clare landscape, where exposed limestone made large slabs available and early farming communities left their mark across the uplands.

Very little specific detail about this particular structure has yet been made publicly available, which itself says something about how many of these monuments exist across Ireland. The country holds hundreds of recorded wedge tombs, and the work of cataloguing and publishing information on each one is ongoing. What is known is that the Leana tomb is a recorded archaeological monument, legally protected, and part of a broader pattern of prehistoric activity across this part of Clare. The townland name, Leana, derives from the Irish for a wet meadow or marshy ground, a reminder that the modern landscape and the one in which these tombs were constructed may have looked quite different from one another.