Kiln - lime, Kinlough, Co. Leitrim

That, in its way, is the point. A lime kiln once stood here, a structure used to burn limestone at high temperatures to produce quicklime for fertilising fields and mortaring walls, and by the mid-nineteenth century it was significant enough to be recorded on the first Ordnance Survey six-inch map of Ireland, published in 1835. Today, no surface trace of it remains.

The 1835 map shows the kiln sitting within a triangular enclosure, roughly 45 metres north to south and 30 metres east to west, with a laneway running north from the enclosure to connect it to the main street of Kinlough some 100 metres to the east. By the time the revised Ordnance Survey edition appeared in 1907, the kiln itself was depicted as a small D-shaped feature, approximately 15 metres by 10 metres, with its straight side facing south-east, the conventional cartographic shorthand for a structure of this kind. The two maps together trace the kiln across roughly seven decades of use and record, from an active industrial feature at the village edge to a residual outline on paper. Whatever physical fabric remained after 1907 has since disappeared entirely into the grassland.