These structures, essentially stone furnaces in which limestone was burned at high temperatures to produce quicklime, were once indispensable to farming communities. The resulting lime was spread on acidic soils to improve fertility, and used in mortar for building. Their presence in a townland is often the only surviving trace of an agricultural economy that shaped the landscape for centuries.

Clonmoher sits in County Clare, a county whose geology is dominated by limestone, which made the raw material for such kilns readily available. The wider Burren region and its fringes were particularly well suited to small-scale lime production, where farmers or local landowners could cut fuel and quarry stone within a short distance of one another. Kilns of this type were typically built into a hillside or an earthen bank, allowing the charge of limestone and fuel to be loaded from above while the burned lime was raked out from an arched opening at the base. Most date from the eighteenth or nineteenth century, when agricultural improvement movements encouraged landowners and tenants alike to treat their land more systematically. The specific history of this particular kiln at Clonmoher remains to be fully documented, but its existence points to that same broader effort to work the land more productively during a period of considerable change in Irish rural life.