The Shee Alms House is one of the oldest surviving alms house in the country. A coat of arms plaque to the front elevation bears an inscription with the date ‘1581’, while a plaque to the rear gives a date of 1582. In order to raise the building’s visual exposure, the Alms House was intentionally cited in close proximity to St Mary’s Church ecclesiastical complex. St Mary’s had a particular association with the merchant class in Kilkenny, and many of its prominent families were buried here (including Shee, Archer and Rothe).
The Shee Alms House was built by Richard Shee, originally to house six ‘honest, unmarried men’ and six widows aged 50 or older (Bradley 2000, 6; Law 2013), with female inmates on the ground floor and male inmates on the upper floor.
See the models for plaque inscriptions and annotations. A safe is visible on the ground floor of the Point Cloud Model (https://skfb.ly/oKqAZ). In order to present the building in its raw state, it was removed from the 3-D Rendered model.
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