A lime kiln was essentially a stone furnace, typically built into a hillside or bank, used to burn limestone at high temperatures to produce quicklime. That quicklime was then slaked with water and spread across acidic farmland to improve soil fertility, or used in the making of mortar for construction. For centuries, these structures were as fundamental to farming as the plough itself, and almost every parish had at least one.

The Knockane kiln belongs to a tradition of small-scale, locally operated burning that was particularly active in Ireland from the seventeenth century onward, reaching a peak during the agricultural improvements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Landowners and tenants alike relied on lime to counter the naturally acidic soils common across much of Munster, and the presence of a kiln in a townland often signals proximity to a limestone source or a community organised enough to sustain the labour-intensive burning process. The kilns themselves were usually built from the same stone they processed, giving them a certain self-referential solidity, and many survived long after they fell out of use simply because they were too well-built to bother demolishing.