The name, roughly translated from Irish, refers to a burnt mound, and these low horseshoe-shaped banks of fire-cracked stone and dark, charred earth are among the most common prehistoric monuments in Ireland, numbering in the thousands across the country. The working theory, broadly accepted among archaeologists, is that they served as outdoor cooking sites. Animal hides or wooden troughs would have been filled with water, heated stones dropped in to bring the water to a boil, and meat cooked in the resulting natural cauldron. They date most commonly to the Bronze Age, roughly 2000 to 500 BC, though some examples are earlier or later.

What makes any individual fulacht fia worth pausing over is precisely how unremarkable it appears. There is no tower, no carved stone, no obvious drama. Just a low mound, often crescent-shaped, usually found close to a water source, the accumulated debris of repeated use over generations. The Fountain example in Clare is one of many such sites catalogued across the county, a county that, given its geology and the peat preservation conditions of its boglands, has yielded a particularly dense concentration of prehistoric material. The presence of water nearby, whether a stream, spring, or marshy ground, was almost always a condition of where these sites were established, which gives the townland name here a certain quiet aptness.