Lime kilns were once a commonplace feature of the Irish agricultural landscape, stone-built furnaces used to burn limestone and produce quicklime for spreading on acidic soils or for use in mortar. This one is unusual in that it appears to have been roofed, with the remains of what looks like a corbelled structure surviving above the walls, a technique where stones are laid in progressively overlapping courses to form a rough vault without the use of mortar.

By 1834, when the first Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded this part of Monaghan, the kiln already existed as a rectangular structure at the eastern end of a short lane. That lane ran west to a cottage roughly forty metres to the south-west, a building that is now derelict. The pairing of kiln and cottage on the same lane suggests the kiln served the smallholding directly, a working part of a now-vanished domestic economy. Two drystone walls survive to a length of around 2.2 metres each and a height of approximately 1.2 metres, with a considerable quantity of collapsed stone lying on the floor between them.