What looks, from a distance, like a collapsed outbuilding is in fact a lime kiln, a type of industrial furnace once used across rural Ireland to burn limestone at extreme temperatures, producing quicklime for fertilising fields and mortaring walls. This particular example is substantial by any measure, running roughly eight metres east to west and nearly seven north to south, with a front face rising to around eight metres while the rear, built into the natural break in the slope, stands only about two metres above ground. The difference in those two measurements tells you almost everything about how the structure works: the hillside itself is part of the design, allowing carts to tip limestone and fuel into the top from the higher ground behind, while the burned lime was drawn out from the arched opening at the front below.

The kiln appears on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842, which places its working life somewhere in the early to mid nineteenth century, a period when land improvement schemes and the consolidation of agricultural holdings made lime burning a widespread and economically significant activity across Munster. The front elevation, facing north, is now inaccessible, but a wide stone arch recess remains visible, with a smaller inner arch set within it, the arrangement that would have allowed workers to rake out the finished lime from the draw hole at the base of the burn chamber. Sloping slabs are visible at the rear, and the funnel at the top, through which the raw material was loaded, is obscured by vegetation and cannot currently be examined closely.