The building's floor level lies noticeably below the present street, a detail that turns out to be geologically telling rather than merely architectural. The ground beneath this corner was once the bed of a lough, a shallow lake that occupied a valley in this part of the city before its waters were eventually drained away through a sewer cut to the river. The house, in other words, was built into a landscape that no longer exists.

Writing in 1858 and 1859, a historian named Hogan recorded local testimony that the building was the oldest house in Kilkenny, and his own reading of the fabric supported that claim. He noted that the chimneys projected through the gable walls in a manner consistent with construction predating the Elizabethan period, and that the general character of the masonry pointed in the same direction. The house appears on John Rocque's map of 1758, at that point sitting on the west side of what was then called Flood Street, between the street and a small passage leading into gardens. A later researcher, O'Carroll, writing in 1983, attributed the original building to Thomas St. Ledger and placed its construction towards the end of the sixteenth century, which would make it a late medieval or very early post-medieval structure depending on how precisely one dates the masonry style Hogan described.

The remains are still visible at the corner of Friary Street and Parnell Street, though they require a knowing eye. The streets themselves have been renamed since the building went up, Flood Street becoming Parnell Street and Watkins Street becoming Friary Street, so the place has accumulated layers of civic reinvention even as the old stonework has persisted behind it. What to look for is the corner structure itself and the remnants behind the garage: evidence of a building that predates the street level around it, sitting slightly sunken into a valley that the city has long since forgotten was ever there.