It is, in fact, a fragment of a late sixteenth or early seventeenth century building, one of the older surviving traces of domestic construction in this part of the city. The giveaway is the material and the detail: roughly coursed limestone rubble, the kind of workmanlike stonework common to early modern Irish urban buildings, and within it a flat-headed window, now blocked up, whose cut limestone surrounds remain visible. The window is slightly wider than it is tall, and notably lacks external chamfering, the angled cutting back of stone edges that was a common decorative and practical finish on window openings of this period. Its absence here suggests a relatively plain, functional building rather than anything of high status.

This fragment forms part of the south wall of that earlier structure, now embedded in the north wall of the yard. The building itself once occupied the ground behind what are today 73 High Street and 36 to 37 St Kieran's Street, addresses that together straddle the boundary between two of Kilkenny's principal medieval thoroughfares. What stands at 73 High Street today is likely to contain further fabric from the same early modern building, absorbed and built over across the centuries in the way that urban properties tend to accumulate layers. The visible yard wall, then, is less a ruin than a seam, a place where a later streetscape has not entirely digested what came before it.