The northern front wall has fallen away entirely, leaving a D-shaped hump of earth and stone roughly three and a half metres high and around six metres wide. Poking through near its centre is a stone-lined funnel just over a metre in diameter, the surviving throat of a structure that once burned limestone at fierce temperatures to produce quicklime for spreading on fields.

Lime kilns of this kind were common across rural Ireland during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, particularly as improving landlords and tenant farmers alike embraced the practice of liming acidic soils to increase crop yields. The kiln at Knockaninane dates to the mid to late nineteenth century, a period when such structures were being built and used across Kerry's farmland before cheaper imported lime and shifting agricultural economics rendered them redundant. The recess visible at the centre of what remains of the front wall, approximately one and a half metres wide and a metre deep, would have served as the draw hole, the opening through which the burned lime was raked out once the firing was complete. That this particular kiln collapsed rather than was deliberately demolished suggests it simply fell out of use and was left to the slow work of weather and gravity.