Lime kilns were used to burn limestone at high temperatures, producing quicklime that farmers spread on acidic soils to improve fertility, and that builders mixed into mortar. They were once a familiar feature of the Irish landscape, but many have crumbled into obscurity or been absorbed back into the land around them. The presence of one on Fínis, a small and now largely uninhabited island, is a reminder that even isolated communities maintained the same practical infrastructure as the mainland.

Fínis, whose name derives from the Irish for island, sits in the southeastern reaches of Lough Corrib and was once a settled community with its own church and patterns of land use. The lime kiln would have served the islanders in much the same way as similar structures served farming communities across Connacht, reducing the labour of transporting processed lime from the mainland by allowing production closer to where it was needed. The logistics of burning lime on an island, sourcing the fuel and the stone, and distributing the product across fields accessible only by water, would have demanded a degree of communal effort and local knowledge that is now difficult to reconstruct in any detail.