Kilns of this kind, typically built from stone and used to burn limestone at high temperatures to produce quicklime, were once common features of the Irish rural landscape. Farmers relied on lime to neutralise acidic soils and to mortar building work, making the kiln as essential to an agricultural community as a well or a forge. That one has been formally recorded here suggests it retains enough physical presence to warrant protection, even if its precise construction date and full history remain to be fully documented.

Leamhchoill, whose name derives from the Irish for elm wood, sits in a part of Connacht where the land carries long memories of subsistence farming and periodic hardship. Lime kilns in this region tend to date from the eighteenth or nineteenth century, periods when agricultural improvement movements encouraged landlords and tenants alike to invest in soil treatment. The remains of such kilns, often a circular or D-shaped stone structure set into a hillside to aid draught, can be easy to overlook in the landscape, resembling at first glance nothing more than a collapsed field boundary or an overgrown hollow in the ground.