Below that plaque, the ground-floor arcade, three wide elliptical-headed arches that once opened onto a busy market square, has been filled in with doors and windows. A modern memorial to Irish patriots sits nearby, almost in conversation with the royal stonework above. The same building that once administered commerce and law under the Crown is today part of a co-operative shop, and that layering of contradictory identities is written into the masonry itself.

The building was erected in 1823 at a cost of £3,000 by the Earl of Kingston, the Anglo-Irish landlord who effectively shaped much of Mitchelstown's planned townscape during that period. By 1842, when the Ordnance Survey recorded it on their six-inch map, it was marked as the Market and Court House, with an enclosed yard to the rear labelled, with period spelling intact, the Potatoe Shambles Market, a shambles being an old term for a market dealing in produce or livestock. The front elevation and parts of the north and south sides were built in coursed limestone ashlar, cut and laid in neat horizontal courses, while the rear walls were constructed in rougher random-rubble with dressed quoins at the corners. A pedimented breakfront, a slight forward projection capped with a triangular gable, rises at the centre of the facade, giving the building a formal civic character that its market-hall function somewhat belies. On the north elevation, a door inserted at a later date cuts awkwardly into an earlier blocked window, the kind of small architectural scar that accumulates over a building's working life. The Mitchelstown Co-operative purchased the structure in the 1940s, and the rear yard, where North Cork farmers once sold their potatoes, partly survives behind the modern additions that now extend from the south.