Masonry charcoal kilns appear to have been a substantially American development of the nineteenth centuty (e.g. F.Overman 'The Manufacture of Iron, in all its various branches', Philadelphia, 1849, the first comprehensive and widely circulated US work on the industry, does not mention kilns, strongly suggesting that they were not at that time yet commonplace). I have not encountered references to their use in the UK, where heap and clamp charocal burning predominated until the mid and late C19 when iron retorts came into use to collect chemicals that were otherwise wasted (the process of charcoal making then becoming, properly, the destructive distillation of woood to produce chemicals, with charcoal almost a by-product).
There was a wave of closures / conversions of charcoal iron smelting blast furnaces in the last two decades of C18 as coke smelted iron became usable for virtually all uses. The last niche that charocal smelted iron occupied, for a few decades longer, was for high qulaity sheet production, especially tinplate manufacture. The charcoal iron industry was largely confined to the north-western and western fringes of the UK after 1800. Techniques were developed that permitted the use of coke pig as a raw material, further reducing this last niche market for charcoal iron and, save for a handful of well-known furnaces, charocal iron smelting was extinct after the 1820s.
Here is a list of closure dates for those Welsh charcoal iron furnaces that survived after 1800, with their closure dates:
Dyfi (Cardiganshire) probably c.1801; Trosnant (Pontypool) period 1805 to 1831; Tintern period 1806 to 1825; Carmarthen 1821. The last three were connected to tinplate works.
Elsewhere in the UK, well-known late survivors include Duddon (Cumb) 1871; Bonawe (Argyll) 1876; Warash (Hants) 1877; Newland (Lancs) 1890; Backbarrow (Lancs) 1921. Backbarrow was the very last charcoal fuelled iron blast furnace to operate in the UK; it continued to smelt but with coke, until 1966.
References: P.Riden 'A Gazetteer of Charcoal-fired Blast Furnaces in Great Britain in use since 1660', 2nd ed, Cardiff, 1993. P.Riden & J.G.Owen 'British Blast Furnace Statistics 1790-1980', Cardiff, 1995.
Essentially, the UK charcoal iron industry declined too soon to take advantage of masonry kiln charocal making techniques.
The kilns appear to be an adaptation of beehive coke ovens. Beehive ovens appear to have been initially developed in the mid C17 to permit the limited recovery of some charocoal making by-products, mainly tars. Their early application to the cokeing of coal - as opposed to the coking of wood - seems to have been later in the mid C18, but abundant supplies of cheap metallurgical and coking coals resulted in open heap coke making predominating until the mid C19. Curiously, it was the demand for coke for railway locomotives (steam coal burnt too hot and melted the firebars, so in the 1840s and well into the 1850s, coke was the preferred fuel) that stimulated the more widespread adoption of beehive coke ovens and seems to haev lead to the transfer of this technology to the iron smelting industry. With beehive coke ovens for the cokinmg of coal being widespread and standard by the 1860s, it seems that the adoption of similar technology for charcoal making was derived from coke ovens rather than being by direct descent from the C17 masonry wood distillation ovens.
Ref: R.A.Mott (ed) 'The History of Coke Making and of the Coke Oven Managers' Association', Cambridge, 1936.
Although the UK charcoal iron smelting sector did not appear to have made use of masonry kilns, there was widespread use of cast iron horizontal retorts for the destructive distillation of wood to make naptha, acetic acid, methyl acohol, acetone and tar (and many distillation works further processed the acetic acid to produce calcium acetate, lead acetate and sodium acetate). There were many of these organic chemical works scattered around the western and north western wooded regions of the UK; the charcoal they produced was one of the least valuable by-products and found a ready market with the handful of surviving iron smelters still smelting charcoal cast iron, and also with tinplate works as the highest grades of tinplate were made from charcoal re-worked sheet until the 1870s (and even occasionally down to the 1930s). Hende there wee concentrations of these chemical works in the tinplate producing areas of south Wales (Ref: R.A.Craig, R.Protheroe Jones & M.V.Symons 'The Industrial & Maritime History of Llanelli & Burry Port 1750 to 2000, Llanelli, 2002, esp pp.295-310 'Chemical Works').
However, the lion's share of charcoal for smelting use seems to have continued to come from tradtional temporary woodland claamp buring operations right until the the final deminse of demand for this fuel from smelters and tinplate works' iron forges.
A fine study of woodland charcoal production forms part of M.Bowden (ed) 'Furness Iron: the physical remains of the iron industry and related woodland industries of Furness and southern Lakeland', Swindon, 2000.
The C19 importance of charcoal to the US iron industry is pointed up by the earliest Federal statistics for the industry. In 1854 the US smelted 657,000 tons of iron (to the UK's 3.1 million tons), of which 306,000 tons was charcoal iron. The charcoal sector continued to expand, peaking at 628,000 tons in 1890 though by this date its share of total US production was small as 9.2 million tons was produced. As late as 1923, 251,000 tons of charcoal iron was produced. The size of the US charcoal iron sector was a reflection of the immense woodland resources of the country. It is hardly surprising that with the industry so large, different technologies, including masonry charocal kilns, should be tried and adopted whereas the UK charocal iron industry had dwindled to unimportance long before.