Almshouses were charitable institutions, typically endowed by wealthy patrons to provide basic accommodation for those deemed deserving of support, and this example is described as the most convincingly Jacobean surviving in the country. That it has outlasted every comparable building in Ireland makes it a quietly remarkable fixture in a town already layered with medieval fabric.

The building was endowed by Richard Boyle, the first Earl of Cork, in either 1613 or 1634, with the specific purpose of housing six poor Protestant widows. Boyle was one of the most powerful figures in early seventeenth-century Ireland, and his mark on Youghal was considerable; the almshouse is among the more personal and legible traces of his patronage. The structure is built of sandstone rubble, with four ground-floor doorways arranged in pairs beneath pointed arches, and window alignments on the upper floors that follow the same vertical rhythm. Hood-mouldings in stone survive above the ground-floor windows, and a plaque bearing Boyle's coat of arms is placed centrally on the front elevation. The north-west gable turns the corner into Church Street, where the building continues in a lower two-storey section with gabled frontage. By 1837, Samuel Lewis was already noting that the building had been recently rebuilt in its original style, with the founder's arms still in place. A further renovation was carried out in 1987 by Cork County Council, which converted the building for residential use.

The building sits at a corner that still reads as a genuine street junction, and the Church Street elevation offers a useful second angle on the structure's unusual form. The coat of arms on the main façade is worth pausing over; it is a direct, material connection to the man who put it there, whatever the exact date of construction.