It is a substantial structure for something so easily missed, and the detail that makes it quietly intriguing is its probable reason for being there at all: the kiln does not appear on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842, which suggests it was built after that date, most likely in connection with Rathduff railway station, which once stood about a hundred metres to the east along the same now-abandoned lane.

Lime kilns were industrial furnaces used to convert limestone into quicklime by burning it at high temperatures; the resulting material was essential for agricultural liming, mortar, and whitewash. The arrival of a railway line would have made such a kiln commercially viable by dramatically reducing the cost of transporting both the raw limestone in and the finished product out. This one is a double kiln, meaning it has two separate burning chambers side by side, their circular funnels each measuring roughly 2.75 metres in diameter. The west-facing front presents two arched recesses, each approximately 1.5 metres high and 2.4 metres wide, set about 3.2 metres apart; the northern recess is now blocked by an iron gate. A sloping ramp runs up the rear of the structure, which would have allowed workers to tip limestone and fuel into the tops of the funnels from above. The railway it served has long since closed, and the station it neighboured has vanished from the landscape, leaving the kiln as an industrial remnant whose context has almost entirely disappeared around it.