Lime kilns were industrial furnaces used to burn limestone at high temperatures, producing quicklime for agricultural use, mortaring, and whitewashing; this one is a fairly complete example of a type that once dotted the Irish countryside wherever good limestone could be quarried nearby. What makes it worth a second look is the way it was built directly into the quarry face itself, using the natural rock as a back wall and structural support, a practical economy that gives the structure an almost geological quality, as if it grew out of the hillside rather than being placed against it.

The kiln's front elevation faces south, presenting a stone-arched recess roughly two and a half metres high, two and a half metres wide, and three metres deep, with a lower inner arch carried on a lintel. This is the draw hole, the opening through which workers would have raked out the burnt lime after firing. Behind that opening, the remains of sloping slabs can still be made out at the rear. The tall random-rubble limestone walls that frame all of this encase an earthen core, and at the top, now heavily overgrown, a funnel of around three metres in diameter is still visible when you look up through the recess. The construction is mixed: the base is brick-lined, while the upper levels are finished in stone, a detail that hints at the practical patchwork of materials available on a working estate.