It is incomplete at both ends, which gives it the slightly disorienting quality of a stage flat, a fragment of a building that once had depth and interior life but now presents only its face to the street. A drinking fountain sits in a modern pointed recess at ground level, which is curiosity enough, but the real interest lies above it, where the original domestic architecture of a medieval Limerick townhouse can still be read, layer by layer, up the stonework.

The wall is known as Bourke's House, and it is described in the Urban Survey of Limerick compiled by Bradley and colleagues in 1989. The survey records the facade as approximately 12.5 metres wide, built of roughly coursed rubble limestone. A large concave moulding runs across most of the facade about two metres above ground level, the kind of decorative horizontal band that would have given the exterior a degree of formal articulation. Above the drinking fountain, at around three metres, a pointed recess marks the location of a former fireplace, with the chimney flue still traceable rising above it. To the west of that fireplace position, a small wall cupboard survives, the sort of built-in recess used in medieval domestic interiors for storing household goods or valuables. Higher still, at roughly six metres, the wall thickens inwards by forty centimetres and is carried on a row of flat lintels resting on pyramidal corbels, a corbel being a projecting bracket of stone built into a wall to bear a load above it. Above each lintel sits a relieving arch, designed to distribute the weight of the masonry above and protect the lintel from being crushed.

The wall is visible from the street and requires no particular effort to find, though it is easily passed without a second glance if you are not looking for it. The junction of Athlunkard Street and Mary Street is a working part of the city rather than a tourist quarter, and the fragment sits in that context without ceremony. The drinking fountain at its base, a later insertion, almost certainly occupies the position of the building's original doorway. Looking up from that point, the sequence of moulding, fireplace recess, cupboard, corbelled lintels, and relieving arches tells a coherent structural story, the compressed vertical biography of a medieval urban house that otherwise no longer exists.