A kiln, in its broadest sense, is simply a high-temperature furnace used for firing ceramics, drying grain, or burning limestone into quicklime, but this one offers no clear indication of which function it served. The chamber that might have answered the question was destroyed long before anyone thought to ask it.

The excavation was carried out in 1987 by Brian Hodkinson, ahead of redevelopment works on a plot measuring roughly eight metres along John Street by twenty-one metres in depth. The site told a layered story. Through the medieval period, the area appears to have functioned as a back yard or garden, with little in the way of building remains but with the characteristic grey-brown silty clay that suggests low-level domestic use. A handful of pottery sherds, both imported and locally made, along with animal bone, were the main finds from that era. The seventeenth century left a more substantial mark: at least one wattle and daub structure, a building technique using a woven lattice of timber daubed with clay or mud, had stood on the site before being destroyed by fire. The kiln came from this same period. Only its flue survived; the chamber itself had been cut away by later cellar construction. A shallow pit at the kiln's mouth appeared to be part of the same installation, but together the two features still yielded no firm evidence of what was being produced. A coin of James II, found in the demolition debris of the kiln, at least anchors it loosely to the late seventeenth century.

There is nothing to see at the John Street and Davitt Street corner today; the archaeology exists now only in the excavation record, catalogued on excavations.ie and in the national monument register. For anyone interested in urban archaeology or the unglamorous work of reading a city through its buried layers, the report is worth seeking out. What the kiln was making remains an open question, which is, in its own quiet way, the most interesting thing about it.