Beneath a field on the edge of Kildare town, sealed under the compacted remains of an earthen platform, an Iron Age kiln sat undisturbed for more than two thousand years. It was only the prospect of a large commercial development that brought it to light at all, in 2005, when archaeologists working ahead of construction in an area known as Grey Abbey uncovered the structure in what their records designate Field 1.

The kiln takes a figure-of-eight shape in plan, a form common to corn-drying and grain-processing kilns of the period, in which two connected chambers, one for combustion and one for drying, allow heat to be drawn through the structure without exposing the crop directly to flame. This example measured 2.7 metres in length overall. The fire bowl, the lower combustion chamber, was positioned to the south and measured roughly 0.75 metres north to south, 0.57 metres across, and nearly a full metre in depth. Radiocarbon dating placed its use somewhere in the range of 196 to 4 BC, squarely within the Irish Iron Age, a period during which cereal processing of this kind was becoming increasingly organised across the country. The earthen platform above it, presumably constructed to manage the working surface around the kiln, had not been fully excavated at the time of reporting, leaving open the question of what else it might contain.