At five and a half metres tall, its front wall is braced by considerable buttresses, and the whole structure has a purposeful, almost fortress-like solidity that catches the eye before the function of the thing quite registers.

Lime kilns were the workhorses of pre-industrial agriculture and construction. Limestone or shell was packed into a stone-lined funnel, alternated with fuel, and fired over many hours in a brick-lined oven until the material converted to quicklime, which could then be spread on fields to correct acidic soils or mixed into mortar for building. The Ballincolla kiln follows this typical form closely: a stone-lined funnel of around one and a half metres in diameter sits above an arched recess, measuring roughly two metres high and two and a half metres wide, in which the brick oven is set into the eastern side. The funnel itself is now infilled, and the top of the kiln is enclosed by a stone wall. The siting against the slope is deliberate and practical; workers would have loaded fuel and stone into the top of the funnel from above, taking advantage of the natural rise of the ground, while the oven and draw hole below allowed the fired lime to be raked out at the base. The proximity to the harbour suggests that shell, an alternative to quarried limestone and readily available along this coastline, may well have been the raw material used here, and that the finished lime could be distributed easily by boat.