It is modest enough that a passing driver might take it for a field boundary or the remnant of a forgotten outbuilding, but the central arched recess gives it away: this is the front face of a lime kiln, a structure built for burning limestone at intense heat to produce quicklime, the caustic powder used to fertilise acidic Irish soils and to make mortar for building.

The kiln dates to the mid or late nineteenth century, a period when such structures were commonplace across rural Ireland. Farmers and landowners relied on them to process local limestone, and many were built close to roads so that fuel and raw stone could be brought in and the finished lime carted away without too much difficulty. This one, with its front wall standing to a minimum height of around two metres and a width of around three metres, retains a gate pier to its right and sits above a roadside ditch that still runs along the base of the wall. The arched recess would have served as the draw hole, the opening at the bottom of the kiln from which cooled lime was raked out after firing. That the structure has survived at all, draped in ivy and settled into the verge, is largely a matter of its solid construction and the relative quietness of the lane it stands beside.