But what archaeologists uncovered here during pipeline work in 2002 was a corn-drying kiln, a structure so rarely identified in prehistoric contexts that its very existence raises more questions than it answers. The kiln's final firing ended badly: charred cereal seeds preserved in the fill suggest the grain caught, rather than dried, and the whole operation came to a halt. Someone then packed the void with topsoil and walked away.

The site was excavated by Graham Hull and Tony Bartlett as part of Bord Gáis Éireann's Pipeline to the West, a large infrastructure project that cut across counties Limerick and Clare and, along the way, revealed a remarkable number of buried features. The Kiltenan South kiln measured 3.08 metres in length and was lined with limestone slabs, sloping down to a flat base. It had two working parts: a stoke-hole at the western end where fuel was fed in, and a firing chamber at the eastern end where the base was visibly reddened from heat. Four distinct fills were recorded inside, including layers of charcoal-flecked silty clay, charred seeds almost certainly from cereal crops, and, more unexpectedly, a small quantity of cremated bone. Recovered from the old topsoil above the feature were a barbed and tanged chert arrowhead, a piece of chert debitage, and a possible sandstone hammer; their concentration over a single site, in a project where worked stone of this kind turned up only sparingly across more than 200 excavations, suggests a connection rather than coincidence. A probable prehistoric settlement was also excavated by Kate Taylor less than 200 metres to the west, at Kiltenan North. Two post-holes and two parallel gullies, orientated north-south and spaced 3.5 metres apart, surrounded the kiln; the excavators suggested these may have formed a windbreak around what was, after all, a flammable process, or alternatively a shelter for storing grain before and after drying. The prehistoric artefacts hint at a Bronze Age date, though most comparable kilns are thought to be Early Christian in origin.

The site itself is not publicly accessible as a visitor destination; it was excavated in advance of pipeline construction and the features are no longer visible on the ground. What remains is the documentary record, including the detailed excavation report available through the excavations.ie database. For anyone interested in how rural food processing looked in early Ireland, the report repays close reading: the layered fills of the kiln, read in sequence, amount to a small archive of a single agricultural operation that ended, one afternoon, in smoke.