The poem records which trades worked on which days, and notes that the ladies took Sunday. It is a strikingly domestic detail wrapped around a large municipal undertaking: the walls, when eventually complete, enclosed roughly 105 acres on a steep west-facing slope running down to the confluence of the Barrow and the Nore. The word "eventually" is doing real work there, because a charter from 1374 suggests the town was still unwalled more than a century after that initial digging. The most intensive phase of murage collection, the tax levied on goods entering a town to fund wall construction and maintenance, fell between 1374 and 1420, and the practice continued in some form right down to 1830.

Of the four original town gates, only the Maiden Gate survives, and even that is a partial survival. One side of the entrance passage remains, preserving a niche for a portcullis and traces of groin vaulting, the ribbed ceiling construction typical of medieval masonry. It was conserved in 2012, when later additions were stripped away and the remaining medieval fabric was repointed with lime mortar. Elsewhere along the circuit, a semicircular mural tower built from mortared shale still stands to two storeys, about five metres high, with three windows per storey and a series of narrow slot windows on the first floor. Archaeological work in the 1990s, carried out alongside a drainage scheme, located part of the fosse just outside the wall near this tower. Further along, on Lower William Street, a section of wall about eight and a half metres long and five metres high is preserved above ground, though testing in 2014 revealed that a bank sitting on top of it was nineteenth century in date and concealing a further twenty-nine metres of medieval wall beneath. A 1649 map records a quayside wall with somewhere between three and seven gates. The named gates include the Bunnion Gate at the top of Mary Street, the Three Bullet Gate at the junction of Neville Street and William Street, and the Priory or South Gate at the junction of Lower William Street and Priory Street. The Maiden's Gate, according to this geography, opened towards the Irishtown.

The surviving fabric is distributed across the modern street grid rather than concentrated in one place, so the most legible remnants are the Maiden Gate itself, the mural tower accessible from Nunnery Lane, and the wall section on Lower William Street. The 2014 and 2015 investigations showed that apparently modern masonry in several locations was either concealing or directly overlying medieval work, which means the medieval circuit is more present in the town than it first appears.