Lime kilns are stone-built structures, typically bowl or bottle-shaped, in which limestone was burned at high temperatures to produce quicklime. That quicklime had two principal uses: spread across fields to reduce soil acidity, or slaked with water to make the whitewash and mortar that held together the walls of farmhouses and outbuildings. Their presence in a townland often marks a place where both farming and construction were active enough to justify the considerable labour of quarrying, burning, and processing stone.

The Caheronaun kiln sits in a part of Galway where the limestone geology made such structures both practical and necessary. The Burren fringe and its neighbouring parishes offered ready raw material, and kilns of this kind were built and used by farming communities from at least the seventeenth century onwards, with many remaining in use well into the nineteenth. The particular history of this example, including who built it, when it was last fired, and how it fitted into the local landholding pattern, is not fully documented in available sources at present.