The kiln, a simple industrial feature once used to burn limestone and produce quicklime for fertilising fields and whitewashing walls, was built directly into the earthen bank of a much older enclosure, most likely during the eighteenth or nineteenth century. It is a small detail, but one that says a great deal about how later generations related to the ancient monuments around them, not with reverence necessarily, but with pragmatism.

The enclosure at Gortgarralt was recorded in the early 1940s by O'Kelly, whose 1942 to 1943 survey described a circular raised platform edged by a bank and enclosed by a fosse, the shallow ditch that typically surrounds a ringfort of this type. The overall diameter measured 135 feet, or roughly 41 metres, placing it comfortably within the range of the thousands of raths scattered across the Irish countryside. A rath is a ringfort of earthen construction, built during the early medieval period as a farmstead enclosure, its bank and ditch serving to define territory and protect livestock rather than act as a serious military fortification. The entrance to this one faces north-east, and where the fosse meets that gap, a causeway was left intact to allow passage across the ditch, a feature common to these enclosures and useful for identifying the original approach point. By the time aerial photography via Digital Globe was examined, the site had become tree-covered, its outline still legible from above even if obscured at ground level.

The site is not formally presented to visitors and there is no dedicated signage or managed access. It can be identified on the aerial imagery available through mapping platforms, where the circular tree cover gives the enclosure away clearly against the surrounding fields. Anyone walking in the area should be aware that the interior platform and bank survive beneath the tree canopy, and the causeway crossing the fosse near the north-east entrance remains a point of interest. The lime-kiln built into the eastern side of the bank is the detail worth looking for closely, a reminder that the monument's life did not end with the early medieval period but continued, in altered form, into the agricultural routines of much later centuries.