These structures, essentially stone-built furnaces in which limestone was burned at intense heat to produce quicklime, were once as fundamental to agriculture as the plough itself. The resulting lime was spread across acidic soils to improve fertility, used in the making of mortar, and applied to the walls of farmhouses as whitewash.

Lime kilns of this kind became widespread across Ireland from the seventeenth century onward, reaching a peak of use in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries before imported fertilisers made them redundant. They were typically built into a hillside or bank, allowing limestone and fuel to be loaded from above while the processed lime was drawn off from a lower opening at the front. The Mountinfant kiln sits within this broader pattern of rural industry, one of many such structures that operated at a local, functional scale, serving the farms immediately around them rather than any commercial network.