It leaves no tower, no wall, no arch; just a pit in the ground, a few courses of stone, and the dark stain of old charcoal pressed into the earth. The example uncovered in the townland of Gorteen, in Pubblebrien barony, County Limerick, is a case in point. It sat undetected beneath poorly drained pasture for centuries, never appearing on Ordnance Survey historic mapping, and only came to light because a road scheme happened to cut close enough to find it.

The discovery came in 1999, when archaeologist Ciara McManus was monitoring additional topsoil stripping along the route of the N20/N21 Adare to Annacotty road scheme. The immediate focus of attention had been a moated site lying just 20 metres to the south, a moated site being a medieval enclosed farmstead or manor, typically surrounded by a water-filled ditch, and that enclosure had already been assessed and monitored under an earlier licence. The kiln had fallen just outside the tested area and so escaped earlier notice. What McManus found were two large spreads of black, charcoal-rich material at the surface. Excavation revealed beneath them a pit measuring 3.5 metres east to west and between 1.28 and 1.9 metres north to south, shaped broadly like an hourglass, with a more bulbous western end and an elongated eastern end divided by a loosely stacked column of stones. The sides were lined with roughly hewn limestone blocks, two courses of which survived along the eastern half and the southern edge. A separate spread of charcoal-rich material, measuring 4.5 metres by 2.5 metres and located about 2.3 metres to the south, appears to have been a dump of waste from the kiln's use. No grain survived in the deposits, and no dateable material was recovered, but the kiln's form and construction closely resemble others of medieval date, and its proximity to the moated site suggests the two were probably in use at the same time.

There is nothing to see at the site today. Aerial photography from 2011 to 2013 and satellite imagery from 2018 show no surface trace of the monument, and the surrounding land remains wet pasture with moderate open views in all directions. The value here is less in visiting and more in knowing what lies underfoot in this quietly unremarkable corner of Limerick, where road-building briefly exposed a small, functional piece of medieval rural life before the ground closed over it again.