The Queen's Hotel stands where, in 1681, a man named John Cruce was formally required to construct a house beside his own, its dimensions set out with unusual precision: forty feet long, eighteen feet broad, and fourteen feet high.

The requirement placed on Cruce speaks to a period when Ennis was consolidating its urban fabric and property obligations were sometimes enforced through such prescriptive building conditions. The specified measurements, roughly twelve metres by five metres by four metres, suggest a substantial townhouse by the standards of the time, not a modest cabin but a proper urban structure intended to fill a gap in the streetscape. Whether Cruce complied, and what became of the resulting building over the following centuries before the Queen's Hotel eventually replaced it, the record does not say. What survives is only the obligation itself, a single line in seventeenth-century documentation that fixes one man, one plot, and one set of dimensions at a precise moment in the town's development.