Corn kilns, sometimes called grain-drying kilns, were a practical necessity in the damp west of Ireland, where harvested grain needed to be dried before it could be milled or stored. They typically took the form of a small stone-built flue or bowl, set into a bank or slope to allow a draught to draw heat upward through a perforated floor on which the grain was spread. The presence of one here, in a landscape now more associated with bog and water than with tillage, is a reminder of how intensively these marginal lands were once worked.