Lime kilns were used to burn limestone at high temperatures, producing quicklime that farmers spread on acidic soils to improve fertility. They were working infrastructure, unglamorous and functional, yet their presence in a place like this speaks to the effort ordinary communities put into wringing productivity from difficult ground along the western seaboard.

The Connemara region around Loch Conaortha is predominantly underlain by acidic soils and blanket bog, making lime a particularly valuable amendment. Local kilns, often built into a hillside or bank to allow easy loading from above, would have been fired with peat or coal, sometimes over several days, before the resulting lime was drawn out from the bottom. Many of these structures date from the eighteenth or nineteenth century, a period when agricultural improvement societies and landlord initiatives encouraged their spread across the west of Ireland. The kiln at Loch Conaortha is recorded as a monument, placing it within a long tradition of such features that survive in various states of preservation throughout Galway and beyond.