Kilns of this kind, most commonly lime kilns, were once a fixture of the rural Irish landscape, used to burn limestone at high temperatures to produce quicklime for fertilising fields, mortaring stonework, or whitewashing farmbuildings. They tend to be bowl-shaped or tunnel-fronted stone structures, often built into a hillside to aid loading from above, and many survive in varying states of collapse across the west of Ireland, half-absorbed into field boundaries or overgrown with scrub.