The earthworks here, spreading across an area roughly 300 metres north to south and 270 metres east to west, preserve what archaeologists believe to be burgage plots, the long, narrow property divisions that defined urban life in an Irish medieval town. A burgage plot was essentially a townsman's unit of land, typically fronting a street and running back in a thin strip, used for a house, a garden, outbuildings, or small-scale production. These ones, each measuring between 35 and 40 metres in width, appear to extend westward from the old High Street, though where the western town ditch once ran remains an open question.

For centuries, none of this was mapped. The enclosures do not appear on the Ordnance Survey's six-inch edition of 1840, nor on any later OSi mapping, suggesting they were either overlooked or had already faded sufficiently into the landscape to escape notice. It took a piece of routine infrastructure work to bring them back into focus. In 2016, an ESB electricity trench, 200 metres long, was dug and backfilled across the field south of the friary, connecting a pole to the new entrance of Adare Manor on the N21. When the Archaeological Survey of Ireland inspected the disturbed ground, they found earthworks they judged to be probably related to medieval activity associated with either the friary or the medieval town. Artefacts had surfaced along the line of the backfilled trench, including a sherd of medieval pottery identified as Adare Ware, a locally produced ceramic type, and a fragment of post-medieval stoneware. Burnt bone was recovered from the trench surface just six metres from the road. The earthworks were subsequently confirmed in Google Earth orthoimages from 2009 and 2020, and appear clearly in LiDAR surveys carried out by Transport Infrastructure Ireland.

The field itself sits on a gentle north-facing slope between the River Maigue to the north and the rear of the Dunraven Arms Hotel to the south, with the Augustinian Friary to the east. It is in agricultural use and not formally open to visitors, but the LiDAR imagery compiled by Edmond O'Donovan and uploaded to the national record in August 2020 is publicly accessible and gives a striking aerial sense of the plot boundaries still legible beneath the grass. Those with an interest in medieval urban archaeology will find the context easier to read by first walking the High Street and taking in the friary itself, then considering that the land immediately behind it once formed part of a functioning town whose street pattern and property lines are, in places, still quietly present underfoot.