AbstractConsiderable attention has been devoted in the literature on numerical methods towards securing energy convergence of solutions for, say, linearly elastic plate bending problems. Although energy convergence is necessary it by no means follows that the derived bending moments and shearing forces converge uniformly at a given point and it is this kind of feature which the engineer is really seeking.This question is examined in the context of a problem which is of particular interest to the civil engineering field and concerns the bending of a square plate under uniformly distributed load; the plate has simply supported edges and contains a central square hole with free edges. The solution to this multiply connected and mixed boundary value problem is obtained through a recently developed modification to the Rayleigh–Ritz method which has very general application and renders the solution mathematically valid up to the internal corner points where the bending moments are singular. Use is made of triangular equilibrium finite elements in conjunction with continuous eigenfunctions. Although it is already known that the order (i.e. the eigenvalue) of the singularity at the internal corners is available by inspection, it is an interesting feature of the present solution that a good approximation to the amplitude is also obtained by an inspection of the finite element result