Its front wall, built from random rubble and standing to around four metres in height, presents an arched recess to the road, while inside, a lower inner arch leads back to sloping slabs at the rear. It is a compact and functional piece of vernacular industrial architecture, and its very ordinariness is part of what makes it worth pausing over.

Lime kilns were once a familiar feature of the Irish agricultural landscape. Limestone was burned at high temperatures inside the kiln's bowl, producing quicklime that farmers spread across acidic soils to improve fertility, or mixed into mortar for building work. The North Cork countryside would have depended on such kilns heavily during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when improving the land was both an economic ambition and, for many tenants, a condition of their lease. The kiln at Derry follows the typical draw-kiln form: the sloping slabs at the rear of the lower arch would have allowed the burned lime to be raked out from the base while fresh limestone and fuel were loaded from above. The random-rubble construction, that is, stonework laid without courses or dressing, is characteristically local and unpretentious.