It bears the date 1733, and to most people passing by it would register, if at all, as a minor decorative oddity. In fact it is a datestone salvaged from an entirely different building, a medieval house that once stood elsewhere in the city, and it has been quietly embedded in this commercial facade as a kind of accidental keepsake.

Datestones are exactly what they sound like: carved stones, usually bearing a year and sometimes initials or a brief inscription, set into a building to record its construction or a significant alteration. They were a common enough practice in the eighteenth century, when a property owner might want to mark the occasion of a new build or a substantial renovation. This particular stone, catalogued as LI005-017188- in the Irish archaeological record and compiled by Caimin O'Brien, dates to 1733. The medieval house it originally belonged to, recorded separately as LI005-017182-, is no longer standing in any meaningful sense, but the stone survived and was later incorporated into the facade of what is now the United Drug office building at the Curry Lane and Old Clare Street junction.

The stone is set into the north-facing wall near the entrance, so approaching from that direction gives you the best chance of spotting it without having to double back. It is the kind of detail that rewards a slow pace and a habit of looking slightly above eye level. For those who want a closer look without making the journey, a three-dimensional digital model of the stone is available online at the Sketchfab link recorded in the site notes, which allows you to examine the carving in some detail. The stone is unremarkable in scale and easy to walk past, which is perhaps part of what makes it worth pausing for. It represents a small fragment of eighteenth-century Limerick, lifted out of one context and fixed, somewhat arbitrarily, into another.