The footprint was modest, just forty feet by twenty feet, which gives some sense of how compact early modern civic infrastructure could be, a courtroom and a place of confinement sharing what amounted to a generous suburban garden plot.

The land on which these two buildings were erected was granted by Robert Boardman of Nenagh to James Harrison of Cloughjordan, a transaction recorded in Analecta Hibernica and later placed at what are now Nos. 10 and 11 Pearse Street. The pairing of a Session House with a Gaol was entirely typical of the period; petty sessions courts and their adjoining lock-ups were the basic machinery of local English colonial administration in Ireland, dispensing justice and housing those awaiting it in the same modest compound. That both functions could be accommodated on such a small plot suggests this was a fairly rudimentary arrangement, far removed from the imposing county gaol that Nenagh would later become known for in the nineteenth century.

Nothing of the 1696 structures survives above ground, and the site itself gives no outward sign of its history. The significance here is less in what can be seen than in what the documentary record quietly preserves, a specific date, a specific transaction, and two names connecting a piece of north Tipperary ground to the earliest formal architecture of law and punishment in the town.