Locals know it simply as the 'clock-house', on account of the cupola that sits atop its roof, its clock face peering out through wooden louvres. That clock, made by Mangans of Cork and dated 1838, was installed a year before the building itself was formally completed in 1839, which gives some sense of how central the timepiece was to the whole enterprise. Today the structure serves as a Credit Union, its civic function quietly continued in a different form.

The Strand Street building is actually the third market house to have stood in Kanturk. The first is mentioned in records as far back as 1657, and a second was constructed in 1747 on what the 1905 Ordnance Survey map labels 'Market Sq', a small island site at the junction of three roads. That mid-eighteenth-century building was a fairly ambitious piece of architecture: a two-storey, gable-ended structure with a three-bay arcade at ground level, rectangular window openings above, and a central floating pediment with an oculus, that small circular window used in classical and baroque design to admit light and signal importance. It was built in cut stone and served, at various points, as a place of worship, a manorial courthouse, and a barracks, the kind of institutional multitasking that was common in small Irish towns where civic infrastructure was scarce. That building was probably demolished after 1847, when the area was redeveloped and a three-storey nineteenth-century structure rose in its place.

The present clock-house on Strand Street has its own quiet architectural interest. The southern front elevation runs to five bays, with a central pedimented breakfront of three bays projecting slightly forward, a wide segmental-arched doorway at its centre, and three round-headed windows above. The ground-floor windows on either side carry their own pediments, and small ornate niches sit above each first-floor window, the whole composition finished with a projecting cornice and a low parapet. Around the back, the shambles, an old term for a covered market space used by butchers, was fitted out to accommodate nine of the town's butchers at one time, a reminder that this was always primarily a working commercial building, whatever the elegance of its front face.