Beneath the modifications of a commercial hall lies what was almost certainly a penal chapel, a Catholic place of worship established during or after the era when practising the faith openly was legally constrained in Ireland. The structure does not sit along the conventional east-west axis that Catholic and Anglican churches alike tended to follow, which suggests either that it was adapted from an already-standing building or that it was squeezed onto a small donated plot where the geometry of the land took precedence over liturgical convention.

The O'Connell family, Catholic landlords in the area and relatives of the future emancipation campaigner Daniel O'Connell, are thought to have provided the patronage that made the chapel possible in the first place. No founding date survives, but the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century is the most likely window. By 1822 the building was already straining against its own limitations. The traveller Thomas Reid, writing that year in his "Travels in Ireland", noted that it could not accommodate more than one-third of the congregation that gathered to worship there, and mentioned that a larger structure was already being built nearby. The chapel had, in effect, outlived its purpose. Once it fell out of religious use it was extended and converted into a market hall, the function that gave it the name it carried on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map produced around 1840. Two gothic-style windows survive intact in the south gable, the part of the original fabric least altered by subsequent hands. The north gable is largely a later rebuild, and the lateral walls have been changed enough over time that it is no longer possible to say with confidence which elements belong to the original chapel and which came afterwards. The building was designated a Historic Monument in 1994.