Lime kilns are industrial furnaces in which limestone or shell was burned at high temperatures to produce quicklime, a material essential to pre-modern agriculture for sweetening acidic soils, and to construction for making mortar. Most rural kilns were modest affairs, but this one is a solid piece of vernacular engineering, and it survives in enough detail to read almost like a diagram of how it once worked.

The kiln was already in existence by 1842, when it was marked on the first Ordnance Survey six-inch map of the area, placing it firmly within the broader agricultural improvement movements of the early nineteenth century. Its construction follows a method well suited to the landscape: rather than building freestanding from level ground, it was set against the natural slope of the hillside, which allowed workers to load limestone and fuel into the top of the kiln from above without heavy lifting. The structure itself is built of random rubble, rough uncoursed stonework, encasing an earthen core. On the front elevation, which faces north and measures around 4.8 metres wide, there is an arched recess nearly two and a half metres high and roughly two and a half metres wide, with a shallower inner arch behind it. At the rear of this recess, sloping slabs lead back to a small stoking hole, just fifteen centimetres square, through which the fire was fed and managed. A rectangular opening at the base, slightly under half a metre high, would have served as the draw hole, through which the finished lime was raked out once burning was complete. At the top of the kiln, the loading platform measures five metres north to south and is enclosed by low walls on three sides; a slight depression in the surface marks where the funnel-shaped charging pot once opened, now infilled but still legible in the ground.