On the east side of North Main Street in Naas, at what is now No. 25, a north wall built of stone curves gently at its corner towards the street in a way that ordinary domestic building rarely requires. That rounded projection is one of the few physical hints that something considerably older may be embedded in the fabric of this address, a remnant, possibly, of a structure recorded as far back as the mid-seventeenth century.

The Civil Survey of 1654, a detailed land census carried out in the aftermath of the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland, names a slated house on this site called the Rose and Crown. Slated roofing at that period was a mark of some status, distinguishing a building from the thatched majority. Bradley and colleagues, writing in 1986, placed the Rose and Crown opposite the present Town Hall, and a suggestion published by Costello in the Leinster Leader in November 1985 proposed that No. 25 preserves traces of it in that strikingly built north wall. There is a further complication: the same site has been tentatively identified as Wheatley's Castle, a separately recorded medieval structure. Whether the Rose and Crown was a later incarnation of that castle, built within or over its walls, or simply a near neighbour misidentified across the centuries, remains an open question. The rounded corner, the kind of feature sometimes seen in defensive or semi-defensive urban building, does little to settle the matter, but it does suggest the address has a longer memory than its current appearance implies.