What makes it quietly arresting is the sheer purposefulness of its placement. Someone, at some point, chose this exposed hillside to burn limestone at high temperature, producing quicklime for use as fertiliser, mortar, or whitewash, and they built a substantial structure to do it. The kiln is rectangular in plan, measuring roughly 3.9 metres on its longer axis, with its rear wall cut directly into the upslope, a common technique that allowed the hillside itself to support the back of the structure and made loading from the top easier.

The surviving façade stands to around a metre in height and is built of large, slab-like stones laid without mortar. This dry-stone construction was entirely typical of rural Kerry kilns, where local stone was plentiful and lime mortar was, somewhat ironically, the end product rather than the building material. At the base of the rear wall there is a lintelled recess, a small arched or capped opening through which the burnt lime and ash could be raked out once firing was complete. The rectangular ope at the base of this recess measures just 15 centimetres high by 45 centimetres wide, barely large enough to work through, giving some sense of the heat and effort involved. Above, a circular stone-lined funnel approximately 1.4 metres in diameter would have received the alternating loads of limestone and fuel, coal or turf, that were packed in from the top. The funnel is now partly filled with collapsed material, and further debris has tumbled down the slope on the kiln's south-east side.