The one at Nooan, in County Clare, is a quiet example of a type that appears so frequently in low-lying, waterlogged ground that it has become almost unremarkable to the trained eye, and almost entirely invisible to everyone else. A fulacht fia typically takes the form of a horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked stone, the debris accumulated over repeated episodes of heating stones in a hearth and dropping them into a water-filled trough to bring the water to a boil. What was being boiled, and why, has kept archaeologists occupied for decades.

The majority of fulachtaí fia in Ireland date to the Bronze Age, roughly 1500 to 500 BC, though some sites have produced evidence of use extending into the early medieval period. The classic interpretation, that they were outdoor cooking sites, has been supplemented over the years by proposals ranging from textile processing to brewing to use as communal bathing facilities. None of these theories has been conclusively settled, and Nooan sits within that broader uncertainty. County Clare has a substantial concentration of these monuments, many of them clustered near streams or in areas prone to seasonal flooding, which would have made a reliable water source easy to exploit. The site at Nooan carries no detailed excavation record in the public domain at present, so the specific phasing and any artefactual finds associated with it remain unconfirmed.

Beyond its location in the townland of Nooan, little specific detail about this particular site is currently available, and any visit would be a matter of reading the landscape rather than consulting a fixed interpretation. The mound itself, if visible, would appear as a low, spread crescent of darkened, shattered stone, easy to miss without knowing what to look for.