It stands roughly 140 metres south of the former Inch House, and it was already old enough to be mapped when the Ordnance Survey produced its first six-inch edition in 1839. That map, and the later twenty-five-inch OS edition, both mark it plainly, which tells us it was a working feature of the landscape at a time when lime burning was central to Irish agriculture and construction. Lime kilns were stone-built furnaces used to reduce limestone to quicklime by firing it at high temperatures; the resulting material was spread on fields to improve acidic soils or mixed into mortar for building work.

The name Purcellsinch points to an older history. The Purcell family were a prominent Anglo-Norman dynasty in Kilkenny, and the "inch" element derives from the Irish inis, meaning a riverside meadow or island of land, suggesting the area's character as low-lying ground near water. Inch House itself no longer functions as a residence in any recorded active sense, and the kiln survives as one of the few tangible remnants of the estate's working infrastructure. What makes the location quietly compelling is its proximity to another, far older feature: approximately 190 metres to the east-northeast lies a ringwork, a type of medieval fortification consisting of a circular earthen or stone enclosure, distinct from the more familiar motte-and-bailey castle but serving a similar defensive purpose. The pairing of a medieval defensive site and a post-medieval industrial feature within a few hundred metres of each other, both now absorbed into the same former estate grounds, gives the place an accidental coherence that no single period of history could account for on its own.