It is a quietly deflating document, suggesting that even as the town was being formally recognised, its defences were crumbling. Yet those walls had probably been standing since the mid-thirteenth century, and they were substantial enough when intact: roughly fifteen towers, a battlemented wall walk, an internal rampart, an external fosse, and at least six gates dividing the Upper town from the lower Base town.

A murage grant in 1348 provided funds specifically for repair, murage being a toll levied on goods entering a town to pay for wall maintenance, but the defences never quite kept pace with events. The Battle of Kinsale in 1601 caused damage, and the siege of 1690 was more destructive still, leaving the walls largely broken. Some patching work followed in the eighteenth century, but by 1805 the last three standing gates had been removed entirely. The town's medieval street layout, described by one scholar as a forked-linear pattern, the two branches of which met and continued south-eastward, is thought to reflect the shape of the walled enclosure. The Base town section, extending that linear pattern to the south-east, may actually be a later addition, possibly dating from the late sixteenth century rather than the medieval founding period.

What survives today is almost nothing. Much of the northern wall has been absorbed into a field boundary, reduced in height and stripped of any obviously defensive character. No other remains are visible above ground level. The walls of Kinsale exist now mainly as an absence, legible in the curve of a lane or the alignment of a boundary hedge, rather than in stone.