The defences they once anchored, a circuit of stone walls, earthen banks, and natural obstacles, are now so thoroughly merged with field boundaries and drainage channels that distinguishing one from the other requires some patience and a good deal of imagination. What makes Fore unusual is not simply the survival of the gates themselves but the way the whole defensive system worked: where stone walls ran out, the builders relied on a wet marsh to the north, a sheer rock outcrop six to eight metres high on the west, and carefully scarped hillside to compensate. It was a pragmatic, hybrid kind of fortification.

The defences date to the fourteenth or fifteenth century and are understood primarily through murage grants, which were royal licences permitting a town to collect tolls specifically to fund the building or upkeep of its walls. The earliest known reference is a murage and pavage grant from the reign of Edward III, stipulating a stone wall. In 1436, Henry VI issued a further grant, believed to have been prompted by Irish attacks that resulted in the burning of both the town and its Benedictine priory. Edward IV reaffirmed this grant in 1462 to 1463. The South Gate, a rectangular limestone gatehouse on the road from Crossakeel, retains the footprint of a spiral stair on its west side, suggesting it originally rose to at least one upper storey. Several of its quoins are recycled stones from the priory, including one piece identifiable as part of the cloister arcade. The North Gate similarly survives only to ground-floor level, though a murder hole above the entrance passage confirms that an upper level once existed. Large recesses in the east and west walls at arch level may have held the pivoting eyes on which the gate itself hung. By 1837, Samuel Lewis could still describe the ruins of several square towers and the traceable outline of a considerable town; that outline is considerably harder to read today.

The South Gate stands opposite St Feighin's Catholic Church, and the North Gate lies along the same road to the north. The banks connecting them, roughly one to one and a half metres high and similarly wide, are the most physically present remnant of the wall circuit, though they are easily mistaken for ordinary agricultural earthworks. The natural cliff to the west and the marshy ground to the north are worth looking for as you move around the village; once you know the defensive logic, the topography begins to read as a deliberate system rather than ordinary countryside.