The town walls of Kildare have left almost nothing behind. No stonework survives above ground, no gate arch frames a modern street, and the line of any defensive circuit can only be guessed at by reading old maps and older street names against each other. What makes this particular absence interesting is how much can still be inferred from the gaps.

A charter of 1515 authorised the burgesses of Kildare to enclose the town with a stone wall and a fosse (a defensive ditch), and a murage grant, a tax levied specifically to fund the building or maintenance of town walls, was provided to support the work. Scholars have noted that the grant came a few years after the death of the "great earl" of Kildare, during the lord deputyship of his son, and may have been intended to restore a wall already fallen into decay, or to upgrade a simpler earthen bank. Whether stone walls were ever actually built as a result is uncertain; a murage grant was an authorisation and a funding mechanism, not a guarantee of construction. What is harder to dispute is that Kildare's frontier position made some form of defence sensible, though the presence of a substantial Anglo-Norman castle on the eastern side of the town may have reduced the urgency. The first documentary mention of the town's gates comes only in 1674, when three are named: Clare Gate on the west, on what is still called Claregate Street; Ellis Gate, probably on the high ground of the north-east along Station Road; and White Gate on the east, on Dublin Street near the castle. A structure called the Fire Castle, visible on John Rocque's map of 1757 to the west of the cathedral, may also have formed part of the circuit. A fifth gate, unconfirmed by name, was likely positioned somewhere near the southern end of Bride Street. The same Rocque map records the old name for Academy Street as "Black Ditch or Cleamore Street", and that name, with its suggestion of an earthen bank and ditch, is among the more evocative clues to where the south-western defences once ran, linking Clare Gate to whatever stood to the south before the circuit turned east and then north again past White Gate and Ellis Gate, skirting the cathedral on its way back around.