Yet in 2001, excavation work to the rear of 29 Main Street quietly revealed something worth paying attention to: a building with mortared stone walls, sitting beneath the ordinary surface of a town-centre plot.

The excavation, published by Pollack in 2003, uncovered a sequence of occupation on the site. At least two earlier buildings preceded the structure with mortared walls, suggesting the plot had been in more or less continuous use across several phases. The later building, potentially post-medieval in date, was at some point equipped with a cesspit, a lined or unlined pit used for the disposal of waste, which is a common find on urban plots where successive generations adapted existing structures to their needs rather than starting from scratch. The mortared stone construction points to a degree of permanence and investment that sets it apart from more ephemeral timber building, though precisely when it was built and by whom remains unclear from what was uncovered.