During topsoil stripping along the route in 1999, monitored under licence by Limerick County Council, archaeologists identified the remains of a corn-drying kiln in the south-east corner of a pasture field near Gorteen, in the barony of Pubblebrien. It had never appeared on Ordnance Survey historic mapping, and without the roadworks it might have stayed quietly buried.

Corn-drying kilns were a practical fixture of medieval Irish farming, used to dry harvested grain before milling, particularly important in a damp climate where grain could not be relied upon to dry in the field. The kiln at Gorteen was keyhole-shaped in plan, a design in which a rounded bowl at one end connects via a narrow flue to a hearth at the other, the heat travelling through and drying the grain laid above. This one measured 7.1 metres along its north-east to south-west axis, with the stone-lined sides still intact. Its four fills produced charcoal, shell fragments, gravel and stone, and crucially, the charred remains of oats and hulled barley. A radiocarbon date taken from the fill placed its use between approximately 1215 and 1285, firmly in the medieval period. What makes the site still more interesting is its immediate context: a second kiln sat just across the townland boundary to the east, positioned just outside the ditch of a moated site, which is a type of enclosed farmstead associated with Anglo-Norman settlement, and a third kiln lay around 70 metres to the north-east. A small metalled surface of compacted stones and pebbles, measuring roughly 7 by 3 metres, was found to the north of the kilns, perhaps the remnant of a working area or path.

The site lies in open pasture and is not formally marked or signposted. The excavation has been backfilled, as is standard practice, so there is nothing visible at ground level today. The record is preserved in the published report by McKinstry (2011) and in the national monuments database, where the kiln is listed separately from the associated moated site to its east. Anyone interested in the broader landscape here will find the moated site reference (LI021-017) worth looking up alongside this one, since the clustering of three kilns and an enclosed settlement within such a small area sketches out, however faintly, a working medieval farmscape along a now-unremarkable stream in south County Limerick.