The ringfort, one of the thousands of roughly circular enclosures built across Ireland from the early medieval period onwards as farmsteads and defended homesteads, here lent its own eastern bank to an entirely different kind of industry.

The kiln itself is a substantial structure. Its front elevation, facing south-east, runs to about 7.1 metres wide and 5 metres high, with buttresses flanking a pointed corbelled recess, a small arched opening just under 2 metres tall, through which the burned lime would have been raked out once firing was complete. The rear of the kiln has collapsed, but the stone-lined funnel at the top, just under 2 metres in diameter, survives, along with a 12-metre earthen ramp on the northern side, built along the scarp of the fort so that loads of limestone and fuel could be tipped down into the bowl from above. Lime kilns like this were a fixture of the Irish agricultural landscape from the seventeenth century onwards, producing quicklime that was spread on fields to reduce soil acidity, a practice that became widespread particularly after the agricultural improvements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The random-rubble walls that remain are now heavily overgrown, their earthen core slowly reasserting itself into the surrounding ground.