Roughly ten metres beyond the eastern face of those walls, in a strip of ground between Barrack Street and Burke Street, excavations in 1995 turned up evidence of an earlier phase of settlement that the walls themselves had effectively erased from memory.

What archaeologists found beneath that unremarkable patch of ground was a sequence of mortared stone walling, mud floors, and traces of wicker buildings, the kind of lightweight, woven-branch construction common in early medieval Ireland before dressed stonework became standard. Associated medieval pottery helped to date the remains, and crucially, the structural evidence appeared to pre-date the town wall itself. This places human activity in that spot before Fethard's defences were formally laid out, suggesting that the area outside the eventual wall line was already occupied or built upon when the decision to define and enclose the town was made. The town wall, in other words, did not create the settlement; it reorganised and redrew it, leaving an earlier layer of life just beyond its eastern edge. The findings were published by Moran and Pollock in 1996, drawing attention to how much the story of a medieval Irish town can differ from what its surviving monuments suggest at first glance.