A lime kiln was essentially a stone furnace, usually built into a hillside or bank, in which limestone was burned at high temperatures to produce quicklime. That quicklime was then spread on fields to reduce soil acidity, used in mortar for construction, or applied to the walls of farm buildings as whitewash. For centuries these structures were as fundamental to agricultural life as the fields they served, yet they are easily mistaken for collapsed field walls or natural outcrops of stone.

The Keeltane kiln sits within a landscape in County Cork that would have supported a working agricultural community during the period when such kilns were in regular use, broadly from the seventeenth century through to the late nineteenth, when industrially produced lime became more accessible. The local geology of County Cork, with its bands of carboniferous limestone running through the region, made small-scale lime burning a practical enterprise for farmers and landowners who had access to both the raw material and sufficient fuel to sustain the fire. The specific history of the Keeltane example, including who built it, when it was last fired, and what condition it survives in today, remains to be fully documented.