When surveyors recorded it, the front elevation facing south-south-west was ivy-clad and partially collapsed, the sides of the lintelled recess had fallen away, the rear was buried under dumped rubble, and the funnel, the tapered upper chamber into which limestone and fuel were loaded and burned to produce quicklime for agriculture and building, had been filled in. Local information later confirmed that the structure was demolished entirely sometime after that visit. What remains is essentially a gap in the landscape where a working agricultural feature once stood.

Lime kilns were a common fixture of the Irish countryside from at least the eighteenth century onward, used by farmers to process limestone into quicklime for soil improvement and mortar. This particular example was built into a natural slope, a typical construction method that used the hillside to support the kiln's walls and allowed workers to load material from the top while drawing the burned lime from the arched recess below. The lintelled opening measured roughly 0.9 metres high and 1.1 metres wide. The kiln appears on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842, placing it firmly within the pre-Famine agricultural landscape of Mid Cork. A short distance to the south stands a pair of standing stones, a much older presence in this same townland, the two monuments occupying adjacent ground across a considerable span of human time.