In raised lettering it announces: 'This house was built in the yeare of Our Lord God 1658 by John Cruce.' That date places the construction firmly in the Cromwellian and immediate post-Cromwellian period in Ireland, a time when durable domestic building in towns was hardly the norm, making the survival of the structure, even in heavily altered form, quietly remarkable.

The building on the east side of Abbey Street is three storeys tall and three bays wide, a substantial presence for a mid-seventeenth-century town house. At some point during the eighteenth century it was divided into two separate dwellings, a common enough fate for larger urban properties as family circumstances or ownership changed. Considerable alteration has followed in the centuries since, and the building has long been in commercial use. Yet certain original or early features have persisted beneath and behind the later interventions. Simple plaster cornices dating from the late seventeenth or eighteenth century are still visible inside. The west gable remains intact, complete with its coping stones, and the stone eaves course along the front wall can be glimpsed sitting just behind modern guttering. The west chimney stack is thought to survive too, though it may now be concealed beneath a layer of modern cement, its presence inferred rather than seen.

The plaque itself is the most legible connection to John Cruce and the year 1658. It is an unusual thing to encounter, a named builder and a precise date on a domestic building of this age, and it rewards a second glance from anyone walking that stretch of Abbey Street.