It is an unremarkable enough sight, but underneath or immediately around it, there may lie the remains of something considerably older: a malt house that was already established enough by 1710 to be mapped, and which was probably operating a century before that.

A malt house, in its simplest form, was where barley was steeped, germinated, and dried to produce malt for brewing or distilling, making it an essential piece of infrastructure in any town of any ambition. Gowran's appears on White's map of the town, dated 1710 to 1711, annotated plainly as "Malt House" at a location on the south side of Main Street. The map is an early 18th-century document, but the building it records is thought to predate it by several decades at minimum, placing its origins somewhere in the 1600s. Nothing of it survives above ground today. The gate lodge that now occupies roughly the same ground post-dates it by at least a century, quietly erasing whatever trace remained.