What makes it worth a second glance is the relationship between its design and its setting: the recess opening faces east and sits close to water level, a deliberate arrangement that would have allowed limestone and fuel to be delivered directly by boat at high tide, a common but easily overlooked feature of coastal industrial life in rural Ireland.

Lime kilns were the small-scale industrial workhorses of pre-modern agriculture. By burning limestone at high temperatures, farmers produced quicklime, which was spread on acidic boggy soils to improve fertility. This example is roughly circular in plan, defined by an earthen bank standing to about 2.2 metres, with the lower courses of a rubble-built façade surviving at the north-east. At its centre, a stone-lined funnel, the draw hole through which fuel and limestone were loaded from above and the burnt lime raked out below, measures about two metres in diameter, though it has partly collapsed. The tidal inlet beside it would have made the site practical for a coastal community that relied on water transport for heavy materials before road networks made overland haulage viable.