It occupied the carriageway itself, planted in the road rather than set back from it, and it served the town in ways that shifted and blurred over time: courthouse, guildhall, customhouse, market hall. By 1840 it had vanished entirely, and the first Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded only its absence.

The story of the building can be pieced together through a sequence of early town maps and corporation minutes. Fethard is recorded as having a tholsel, a term for a combined civic and mercantile hall common in medieval Irish towns, as far back as 1596. A rectangle appears in the middle of Main Street on Grace's map of 1703, and by the 1708 Grace map the structure is shown as a single-storey, three-bay building. It is not directly named on that map, but an adjacent property immediately to the east is described as "a toft near the court house in the east", with a toft being a small parcel of enclosed land attached to a dwelling. The neighbouring building beyond that is described as a common bakehouse, which places the courthouse as the single-storey structure to the west of both. By 1747, Fethard Corporation had resolved to convert the lower part of the courthouse into a market house, a practical repurposing that reflected the building's increasingly commercial character. Steile's map of 1752 duly records it as the market house, and Swiney's map of 1763 shows the building still standing, along with two structures to the east. At some point before 1840 it was taken down, and the civic functions it had carried were transferred to the almshouse on Main Street to the south. Archaeological excavations carried out in 2012 uncovered physical evidence of the structure beneath the street surface, confirming what the maps had long suggested.