The castle itself has vanished entirely, leaving this small armorial panel as an accidental survivor, passed from one building to the next as the landscape around it was cleared and rebuilt.

The plaque carries a Latin inscription identifying it precisely: "Insignia Richardi Shee Kilkeniens armigeri 1582", meaning "The arms of Richard Shee of Kilkenny, Esquire, 1582". An armorial plaque of this kind was a formal declaration of family status, carved with a coat of arms to mark ownership of a building or estate. The Shee family were a prominent merchant and landowning dynasty in Kilkenny, and the date of 1582 places this stone in the Elizabethan period, when the town and its surroundings were home to a network of Anglo-Norman families consolidating their local power. The Civil Survey of the 1650s recorded the castle as structurally sound, which makes its complete disappearance all the more striking. Scholarly research suggests the castle may have stood on or close to the site of the old Sheastown House, a later structure documented by Robertson in 1851 and demolished before the end of the nineteenth century. That house occupied a notable position above the river at a right-angled bend in the north avenue to Sheastown Lodge, and when it came down it took the last architectural context for the plaque with it.

The stone now sits quietly in the stable wall, easy to overlook unless you know to look for it. The Latin inscription remains legible, a fragment of a family's self-presentation that outlasted everything else they built here by several centuries.