The defences that once enclosed that earlier settlement have left no obvious trace above ground, and for a long time their precise course could not even be outlined. What makes the situation quietly remarkable is that the manor's own landscaping swallowed the eastern edge of the medieval borough, and it took a combination of old maps, airborne laser scanning, and a hotel construction project to begin recovering what was lost.

The documentary record hints at a town of some consequence. A grant of murage in 1310, murage being a royal licence to collect tolls specifically for the building or repair of town walls, confirms that Adare had defences by the early fourteenth century, and a reference to their repair in 1376 suggests they were still considered worth maintaining. Whether they were ever built in stone is uncertain; the 1989 Urban Survey of Limerick proposed they may instead have been earthen ramparts with timber palisades. Writing in 1865, the Earl of Dunraven recorded that the marks of an old fence or ditch running from Spittle-gate to Castle Ploughland were still plainly visible, though no such traces survive today. The 1656 Down Survey parish map of Ballingaddy, now held at the National Library of Ireland, captured the layout of the medieval town before the Dunraven family's nineteenth-century replanning, and it shows the settlement extending along both sides of what is now the N21. When archaeologist Avril Purcell monitored groundworks at Adare Manor Hotel and Golf Resort between 2016 and 2017, she uncovered medieval burgage plots, the long, narrow urban land units standard to planned medieval towns, complete with slot trenches for timber fences, pits, and post holes, concentrated near the new hotel entrance. A lidar survey published by Transport Infrastructure Ireland in 2018, based on scanning carried out in 2010 and 2011, then revealed the broader pattern: east-west plots on both sides of the road, closely matching the 1656 map. At the eastern end of this settlement, a well-defined pair of parallel features running northward towards the River Maigue strongly suggests a defensive bank and ditch, possibly with a small watercourse feeding towards the Maigue along its eastern side. Anomalies at the southern end of this feature may even mark the position of the Spittle Gate shown on the seventeenth-century map.

The remains lie within the private parkland of Adare Manor and are not accessible to the general public. They are, in any case, entirely subsurface; the parallel features of the bank and ditch showed up in a single aerial photograph taken in low evening sunshine in 2005, and are invisible on images from every other year examined. What the combined evidence of the lidar survey, the excavation, and the Down Survey map makes clear is that a thirteenth or fourteenth-century town of reasonable extent once occupied ground now covered by golf fairways and hotel grounds, and that it continued in use into at least the seventeenth century before the Dunraven demesne gradually enclosed it.