What looks from a distance like a low earthwork resolves, on closer inspection, into a purposeful piece of industrial infrastructure: a rubble-built front wall standing roughly three and a half metres high, a stone-arched recess cut into its face, and the ghostly outline of a funnel at the top, now infilled and visible only as a shallow circular depression about 1.8 metres across.

A lime kiln was a working furnace in which limestone was burned at high temperatures to produce quicklime, a material essential to nineteenth-century farming. Spreading lime on acidic land improved soil fertility, and the expansion of agricultural improvement schemes across rural Ireland during this period made kilns like this one a familiar feature of the countryside. The Shanavoher kiln follows a typical design. Limestone and fuel were loaded from above, down through the funnel, while the drawing arch, here a stone-arched recess measuring roughly 1.6 metres high and just under two metres wide, allowed the burned lime to be raked out from the bottom. The sloping slabs at the rear of the recess helped direct material downward. A ledge survives above the arch on the front elevation, possibly a working platform. Running northward from the structure is an earthen ramp about fifteen metres long, which would have allowed carts or workers to reach the top of the kiln for loading. The earthen core behind the rubble front wall is still largely intact, which accounts for the kiln's survival as a coherent form rather than a scatter of loose stone.