They became visible when the building to the north of what is now Parkinson's Supermarket was exposed during recent works, revealing a south wall that still carries the unmistakable fingerprints of seventeenth-century construction. The supermarket itself, it turns out, sits on the footprint of a house of the same period.

Kilmallock was a prosperous walled town through the medieval and early modern periods, and its streets preserve a surprising concentration of early building fabric, much of it disguised. The Urban Survey of County Limerick, compiled by Bradley and colleagues in 1989, noted that many of the structures along Sarsfield Street are almost certainly seventeenth-century in origin, their original stonework concealed beneath layers of cement or plaster applied in later centuries. Identifying features, the survey observed, are not always immediately recognisable as a result. A painting by Thomas Mulvaney, held in the National Gallery of Ireland, offers a rare visual record of what several of these houses looked like before they were plastered over, showing the cut limestone facades that have since disappeared from street level view.

For a visitor, the experience here is less about looking at a monument and more about learning to read a streetscape differently. Sarsfield Street presents itself as a fairly typical Irish market town thoroughfare, but the survey designation of this structure as House B in a sequence of identified early buildings gives some sense of how layered the place actually is. The limestone detail that came to light during the exposure of the neighbouring structure is not on permanent display in any formal sense; what can be seen depends on the state of the buildings at any given time. The National Gallery's Mulvaney painting, however, is accessible and offers the clearest surviving image of what this street once showed to the world.