Most passers-by would not give it a second glance, and that is precisely the point. The house, recorded as House C in the architectural literature, is one of several along this street whose age is concealed behind layers of cement and plaster applied over the generations. What looks like an ordinary townscape is, in places, a seventeenth-century street in disguise.

The Urban Survey of County Limerick, published in 1989 by Bradley and colleagues, identified a number of structures along Sarsfield Street as almost certainly dating from the 1600s, despite their modern appearances. The survey notes that diagnostic features, the small details that allow a building to be confidently dated, are not always easy to spot once a structure has been plastered over. A painting by Thomas Mulvaney, now held in the National Gallery of Ireland, offers a rare glimpse of what the street once looked like before that process of concealment took hold, showing several of these stone houses in something closer to their original state. House C, situated immediately to the north of what was Parkinson's Supermarket, retained at least one visible clue: that chamfered door jamb on the street frontage, where the edge of the stone has been cut at an angle and the surface worked with a pick, a finishing technique associated with the craft traditions of the period.

Kilmallock itself was a walled medieval town of some significance in County Limerick, and Sarsfield Street runs through its core, meaning the surviving fabric here carries considerable age even when it does not advertise the fact. The door jamb on House C is visible from the street, though you need to look deliberately rather than in passing. It is worth pausing to consider that the wall containing it may have stood for four centuries, quietly accumulating coats of render while the town changed around it. The Mulvaney painting in the National Gallery provides useful context if you want to see what these buildings looked like before the plasterwork arrived.