Lime kilns were once a fixture of the rural Irish landscape, used to burn limestone at high temperatures to produce quicklime for fertilising acidic farmland and for making mortar. What makes this one quietly arresting is its context: by 1842, when the Ordnance Survey mapped it at the six-inch scale, the corn mill it stood beside was already recorded as being in ruins. The kiln had outlasted the industry it once served.

The structure is built into the hillside in the typical fashion, taking advantage of the slope so that limestone and fuel could be loaded into the funnel from above, while the burnt lime was drawn off through the eye, or draw-hole, at the base. Here that eye takes the form of a lintelled corbelled recess, a small vaulted opening formed by overlapping stones, measuring roughly 1.89 metres high and 1.39 metres deep. The funnel at the top has since been infilled, and the forecourt to the east retains the footprint of a small shed, its walls reduced to low remnants. Of the corn mill itself, nothing remains standing. A portion of the millrace, the channel that would have carried water to drive the mill wheel, still traces its line through the ground nearby, the sole evidence of what was once a working complex of rural industry.