Look more closely, though, and the whole ensemble turns out to be an almshouse, a purpose-built residential college for the elderly poor, complete with its own church, garden plots, outhouses, and a cast-iron water font still stamped with the name of its Cork manufacturer.

The complex was funded through the will of James, 4th Baron of Kingston, who died in 1764, and whose stated intention was to provide housing for poor elderly Protestants, principally tenants from the Mitchelstown estate. The architect John Morrison designed the original scheme as a terrace of 22 houses with a chapel at the centre. By 1770, a new overseer, Oliver Grace, had extended the plan with two additional end-houses, and the college formally opened in 1777. The construction is random-rubble limestone, with brick-dressed sash windows, round-headed door openings, and ashlar limestone arches carrying the steps up to each front door. The Church of Ireland chapel at the centre of the range has a rectangular nave and a three-storey tower to the south; originally the tower was a porch with a cupola, but that was removed in the late eighteenth century and replaced with a bell and clock tower. The wide archways that once pierced the centre of the northern ranges, framed by ashlar surrounds and pediments carried on console brackets, were blocked up and converted into apartments in the 1880s when the whole complex was subdivided into 31 units. The southern half of the square was completed separately, its date stone reading 'Kings Square 1780'; those ranges are rendered and noticeably less ornate. By the early twentieth century, the enclosed green had found a rather different use, serving as tennis courts. The cast-iron water font at the centre of the square, erected in 1825 and stamped 'Hive Iron Foundry Maker, Cork', stands as one of the more quietly legible details: a practical object from a working institution, not a decorative afterthought.