The plaque, which belongs to the Shee Alms House, bears the Latin legend INSIGNIA RICHARDI SHEE MILITIS QVI HOC OPVS FECIT AO D 1578, meaning 'The arms of Richard Shee, Knight, who made this work in the Year of Our Lord 1578'. The problem is straightforward: Richard Shee was not knighted until 1589, more than a decade after the date the inscription claims.

The plaque's path to its current position is itself a small puzzle. Around 1900, the historian William Carrigan found it not at the almshouse but at the medieval church at Sheastown, a few miles outside Kilkenny city. Even then, he suspected it did not belong there, reasoning that it had probably been moved at some earlier point from Shee's castle at Bonnetstown or from his town house in Kilkenny. It was during restoration works carried out between 1978 and 1980 that the plaque was installed in its present niche, north of the two-light window at first-floor level on the almshouse gable. Whether the 1578 date reflects a scribal or carving error, a deliberate backdating, or some other circumstance that later scholarship has not resolved, the inscription remains quietly at odds with the biographical record of the man it commemorates.