8 and accessible only from a lane or a neighbouring car park, sits what remains of a medieval building that most people walking past will never notice. It is roofless now, used as a yard, with a lean-to shed of corrugated sheeting taking up most of the interior. A vehicle gate has been knocked through one of its limestone rubble walls. And yet the fabric of the place, once you start reading it, is quietly extraordinary: blocked doorways, reused stonework, a sculpted medieval head mortared into a rebuilt wall, and the possibility that part of a standing two-storey building beside it is itself medieval in origin.

In 1938, Joseph Raftery of the National Museum of Ireland noted a 13th-century sculpted head that was, in his words, embedded in the wall of a castellated tower. That head is still there, set into the east wall of the building, which appears to have been largely rebuilt in the 19th century. Also incorporated into the same wall are two reused jambstones, the shaped stones that would originally have formed the upright sides of a doorway or window opening. On the south wall, near the south-west corner of the building, a blocked medieval doorway survives in partial form: the lower chamfered jamb, cracked and worn, is still legible, along with the voussoirs on one side of the arch surround. Voussoirs are the wedge-shaped stones used to construct an arch, and their presence here confirms this was once a proper dressed-stone opening, roughly a metre wide and close to two metres high. The ground floor of the structure measures approximately nine metres by eight, built from roughly coursed limestone rubble, with walls around 0.8 metres thick. At some point in the 18th or 19th century, the cut-stone quoins at the south-west corner were crudely rounded off, suggesting either deliberate modification or simple expediency.

The building is not signposted and is not presented as a visitor site. The west wall and part of the south wall can be seen from the car park behind No. 9 Main Street, and Burke's Lane (marked as Maher's Lane on older Ordnance Survey maps) runs along the east side of the structure from Main Street. The blocked doorway is visible from the car park side. What is striking, standing there, is the chimney in the south gable of the adjoining two-storey building: disused, projecting, truncated just below the roofline. If, as has been suggested, this chimney once served the medieval building, then the structure behind No. 8 is not simply a fragment embedded in later development, but part of a medieval complex that has, in a sense, never entirely disappeared.