The front wall, built in the random-rubble style typical of vernacular agricultural construction, stands to roughly two metres at the arch, though the rear of the recess has collapsed inward. It is the kind of structure that registers, if at all, as a lump in the hedgerow.

Lime kilns were once a fixture of the Irish rural landscape, used to burn limestone at high temperatures and produce quicklime for spreading on acidic farmland or for use in mortar and whitewash. They required a substantial stone-built chamber, typically with a draw arch at the front through which the burnt lime could be raked out, and this example at Broomhill follows that familiar form. The arched recess is the draw arch, the point where the kiln met the working day of whoever tended it. Such kilns fell out of use as industrially produced fertilisers became widely available in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and most were simply abandoned where they stood, left to settle slowly back into the fields that once depended on them.