A pound was essentially a secure pen maintained by a town or parish authority, where animals found wandering without an owner present could be held until a fine was paid for their release. It was a routine feature of medieval and early modern urban life, and yet surviving examples in their original setting are uncommon enough to make this one worth pausing over.

The enclosure measures roughly 19 by 7 metres externally, and its walls are a patchwork of Fethard's built history. The northern boundary is formed by the wall of Edmond's Castle and the town wall itself. To the west stands the east wall of a former almshouse, and to the east a building gable closes the space. The southern wall, built in roughly coursed limestone rubble and just under half a metre thick, carries an arched entrance with a segmental head, inserted sometime in the eighteenth or nineteenth century. The minutes of Fethard corporation's D'Oyer Hundred jury court, surviving from 1707, record the annual income the pound was generating that year, and between 1708 and 1718 it required repair, including new paving and a replacement door or gate. The frequency of that maintenance suggests the structure was already well established by the sixteenth century. A limited excavation carried out in 1991 added a further layer of complexity, finding that the pound's western wall had originally served as the eastern wall of an earlier building on the almshouse site.