These structures, once commonplace across the Irish countryside, were used to burn limestone at high temperatures to produce quicklime, a material essential for mortaring stonework, whitewashing buildings, and improving agricultural soil. Their presence on a demesne indicates the scale of self-sufficiency that larger landed estates aimed to maintain, producing on-site what the running of such a property required in quantity.

Portumna Demesne is the landscape surrounding Portumna Castle, a fortified house built in the early seventeenth century for Richard Burke, the fourth Earl of Clanricarde. The castle and its grounds passed through several phases of use and decline, and the demesne retains a number of structures that speak to its long history as a managed estate. A lime kiln of this kind would typically have been fed with alternating layers of limestone and fuel, with the resulting quicklime drawn from the base. Their location on demesne land rather than in open farmland often reflects a connection to construction and maintenance work on the estate buildings themselves.