The remains are modest in scale, four metres running east to west and roughly sixty centimetres wide, but their significance lies less in their dimensions than in what they connect: a building that existed, was forgotten, and was eventually mapped, buried, and found again.

The foundations correspond to the eastern portion of a house recorded on John Rocque's 1758 map of Kilkenny, one of the more detailed cartographic surveys of an Irish city from that period. The site sits within the walled Hightown, the historic core of Kilkenny enclosed by its medieval defences, and was uncovered during archaeological monitoring in 2012 by Cóilín Ó Drisceoil. What made the excavation particularly interesting was the additional discovery of what appears to be a medieval slip, a narrow lane or passageway, that once ran to the south of the site. Such slips were common features of medieval urban layouts, providing access between properties or connecting streets to yards and gardens behind the main building frontages. Their survival, even as a trace in the ground, is relatively rare. The house in question sat immediately south of Kyteler's Inn, itself a medieval structure with a long and complicated history on the same street.