Kiln - lime, Kilclogherane, Co. Kerry

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Kilns

Kiln – lime, Kilclogherane, Co. Kerry

Tucked into a gently sloping pasture in Kilclogherane, County Kerry, a lime kiln sits quietly in the landscape, its pointed arched recess still visible in a north-facing front wall nearly five metres wide and almost three metres tall.

The arch, just under a metre and a half across, is partially swallowed now by an accumulation of soil, but enough remains to make out the structure's original form and purpose.

A lime kiln was an industrial feature of the working farm, used to burn limestone at high temperatures to produce quicklime, which could then be spread on fields to reduce soil acidity or mixed into mortar for building. This example follows the typical design: a stone-lined funnel, roughly 1.2 metres in diameter and around two metres deep, into which limestone and fuel would have been loaded from above, while the burnt lime was raked out through the arched opening at the base. Building the kiln into the slope was a practical choice, allowing the loader to tip material in from the higher ground at the back without heavy lifting, while the drawer worked from the lower front. The structure at Kilclogherane is modest in scale but well made, its masonry carefully fitted into the hillside in a way that has kept its basic form intact across what may be centuries of disuse.

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Pete F
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