The site in question was described at the time as 'a waste in St. Ciaran's Well', a telling phrase that suggests land gone to ruin around what had once been a sacred or at least a significant water source. The corporation's solution was practical: lease it out, on the condition that the lessee actually do something with it.

The man granted that lease was a William Jackson, and the something he was required to do was establish a fish shambles. A shambles, in the older sense of the word, was a market stall or slaughtering place for the sale of meat or fish, the kind of noisy, wet, pungent infrastructure that towns needed but rarely commemorated. Jackson's fish shambles appears to have occupied a plot running somewhere between Kyteler's Inn and the building now numbered 27 St. Kieran's Street. Kyteler's Inn is itself a place with a long memory, associated with Dame Alice Kyteler, who faced accusations of witchcraft in the fourteenth century, so the immediate neighbourhood was already carrying considerable historical weight by the time Jackson took on his lease. What became of his fish market after 1688, whether it thrived or quietly disappeared, is not recorded.