It is neither. Built in 1817, it was a meat shambles, a term for a slaughterhouse and butchery complex, and its unusual polygonal geometry reflects a very deliberate piece of early nineteenth-century civic infrastructure rather than any architectural whimsy.

The enclosure wall, roughly 45 metres in diameter and standing about six metres high, is reinforced with corner buttresses and punctuated along its eastern bays by oeil-de-boeuf opes, the small oval or circular windows whose name is French for "bull's eye". An arched doorway opens in the north-west wall, and a two-storey residential house occupies the south-west bay, with an inscribed stone over a central arched passage into the interior, though the passage itself is now blocked and the inscription has worn beyond reading. Inside, the southern wall retains the remains of lean-to stalls where animals or carcasses would have been handled. At the centre of the whole complex stands an eight-sided roofless slaughter house, about 20 metres across and 3.8 metres high, a smaller polygon nested within the larger one. The geometry of the site, with its layered enclosures and carefully considered openings, suggests that whoever commissioned it in 1817 had thought seriously about the movement of livestock, workers, and light. Following renovations around 2000, the shambles was converted into flats and retail units, and the internal west side now holds modern buildings, so the original fabric survives in pieces rather than as a whole. What remains, though, is enough to read the logic of the original design, which is more than can be said for most nineteenth-century slaughterhouses anywhere in Ireland.