It is not the kind of detail that announces itself loudly, but once noticed it raises questions about what, exactly, is hiding inside an otherwise ordinary-looking street frontage.

The chimney's scale is the key clue. Such outsized stacks were characteristic of building practice before around 1700, when fireplaces tended to be grand, functional things rather than modest household fittings. The evidence inside bore this out until 1987, when a limestone fireplace measuring six feet by four feet, roughly 1.8 metres by 1.2 metres, was removed from the building. That fireplace, constructed of dressed limestone blocks, would have been the dominant feature of whatever room it served, closer in proportion to the hearths found in tower houses or fortified dwellings than to anything domestic in the later sense. The north wall, measured at 0.8 metres thick, suggests a structure built to last rather than simply to shelter, and the building has been heightened at some point, meaning its current profile is not quite what earlier occupants would have recognised. Craig and Garner noted the chimney as early as 1974, situating the house as the second building west of the town wall on the north side of Burke Street.