A cashel is simply a ringfort built from dry-stone walling rather than earthen banks, and the form was common across the west of Ireland where stone lay closer to hand than good digging soil. Thousands of these structures survive across the country, yet each one represents a farmstead, a family, a patch of defended ground from roughly the period between 400 and 1200 AD.

Beyond its classification and location, the documentary record for this particular site is sparse. What can be said is that cashels of this type were typically the enclosed homesteads of farming families, the stone wall serving to protect livestock from wolves and to mark out territory in a society where land and cattle were the primary measures of wealth. Clare's Burren region and its surrounds are especially dense with such monuments, the bare limestone landscape having preserved structures that might have vanished under centuries of tillage elsewhere. Nooan itself is a small rural townland, the kind of place where the archaeological layer sits just beneath the surface of everyday fields.