It is the kind of discovery that tends to be absorbed quietly into an excavation report and then forgotten, yet the fragment speaks to an entire lost streetscape.

Excavations carried out in 1994 and 1995 along the northern street front of the Main Guard courthouse, conducted under licence number 94E0188, uncovered this earlier wall running beneath the later structure. The shape suggests a domestic building oriented towards the street, consistent with the pattern of medieval urban housing where the narrow gable faced the road and rooms extended back from it. The historical context behind its presence is equally interesting. Records indicate that the Franciscans, who held property in this part of the town, granted portions of their land fronting the streets to townspeople, who were then free to erect their own houses along those frontages. These plots were known as burgagery lands, a term from medieval urban tenure describing the strip-like holdings assigned to town dwellers, typically running back from a main street and carrying certain rights and obligations under borough law. The arrangement allowed the friars to retain the interior of their property while the street edges became a more ordinary commercial and domestic zone, integrated into the fabric of the town.