10 Irishtown in Kilkenny city, tucked at the corner where Irishtown meets St Canice's Place, a fragment of a late medieval house has survived quietly inside what looked, until recently, like an ordinary two-storey building. The medieval fabric was concealed beneath layers of modern render, and it was only when that render was stripped away during archaeological investigations in 1997 that the true age of the walls became apparent. What emerged were the relatively intact north and south ground-floor walls of an urban house dating to the mid-sixteenth or early seventeenth century, its identity confirmed by two characteristic features: a dressed limestone chamfered single-light window with a rectangular head, the kind of carefully finished opening typical of late medieval construction in the region, and a substantial timber-lintelled fireplace three metres wide.

The north wall, built of well-coursed limestone rubble bonded with lime mortar, still carries that diagnostic window at ground-floor level, sitting slightly lopsided because the building was constructed on soft ground and has subsided over the centuries. A fragment of a second window survives just above it, at the threshold of what was once the first floor. The south wall, running 15.5 metres from the street frontage, contains an internally-splayed doorway that was almost certainly an original feature, positioned in a way that would have opened onto a side lane off Irishtown Street rather than the main thoroughfare. The large fireplace sits just to the west of it, its flue lined with hand-made brick. Kilkenny's late medieval building tradition placed fireplaces on gable walls, and this one conforms to that pattern. The house was not untouched by later centuries: the west wall was removed when the street corner was widened, probably in the eighteenth century, and a second fireplace was inserted into the medieval fabric on the west side of the original one at around the same time. In 1997, the eighteenth-century first floor was demolished, leaving the medieval structure largely intact beneath.

Below the walls, excavation revealed the site's longer biography. Beneath layers of levelling gravel and a deposit of organic material containing butchered bone, interpreted as occupation make-up, archaeologist Edmond O'Donovan reached natural glacial gravel at roughly 1.2 to 1.3 metres below the modern ground surface, and alluvial clay deeper still. The medieval builders had essentially engineered a platform over soft, low-lying ground before raising their walls, which perhaps explains why the building settled unevenly over time and why that ground-floor window now has its quietly tilted look.