These kilns were once common features of the rural landscape, small stone-built chambers where harvested grain was dried using heat from a fire below, a necessary step in damp Atlantic conditions where grain rarely came in dry enough to be ground or stored safely. Their disappearance from everyday use, and from everyday memory, has been gradual enough that many people pass the ruins without knowing what they are looking at.

Corn-drying kilns in Ireland typically date from the early medieval period onwards, though many of the surviving examples in Connacht are associated with the post-medieval centuries, when smallholding agriculture was the dominant way of life across much of the region. The townland name Pollaneyster sits within a landscape that would have been intimately shaped by that agricultural tradition, and the presence of a kiln here is consistent with the kind of subsistence and semi-subsistence farming that persisted in Galway long into the nineteenth century. The grain most commonly processed in such structures was oats, the staple crop of the west, though barley was also dried in this way where it was grown.