Lime kilns were stone-built furnaces used to burn limestone at high temperatures, producing quicklime that could then be spread on fields to reduce soil acidity. On the Aran Islands, where the land is famously thin and rocky, this process was not a minor agricultural nicety but a genuine necessity, the means by which generations of islanders coaxed enough fertility from the karst to sustain crops and livestock.

Cill Mhuirbhigh, sometimes rendered in English as Kilmurvey, sits near the western end of Inis Mór, close to the great prehistoric fort of Dún Aonghasa. The presence of a lime kiln here fits the broader pattern of post-medieval and early modern land improvement across the west of Ireland, where burning locally quarried limestone was the most practical way to work with, rather than against, the geology underfoot. The Aran Islands offered an almost inexhaustible supply of raw material for the purpose, and kilns of this type were built and maintained by farming communities well into the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.