But embedded in garden boundaries, churchyard walls, and the backs of properties along the Bandon river, there survives the fragmentary skeleton of a walled plantation town, one of the more complete examples of its kind in Munster, even if it takes some patience to read.

The town was laid out in the early decades of the seventeenth century under the patronage of Richard Boyle, Earl of Cork, one of the most powerful figures of the Elizabethan and Jacobean settlement of Ireland. A walled enclosure was part of the design from the outset, intended to define and defend a new Protestant colonial settlement on both banks of the Bandon river. Almost nothing of the original built fabric survives above ground, Christ Church being the sole seventeenth-century building still standing, but the line of the walls can still be traced in places with some care. North of the river the remains are scant: a short section survives behind a house on the east side of North Main Street, and the boundary wall of the Christ Church graveyard may preserve the original northern limit. South of the river the picture is richer. Two stretches of the east wall survive between St Patrick's Hill and Casement Road, measuring roughly 22 metres and 11.5 metres respectively. A probable original section of the south wall, around 20 metres long, runs along the steps leading up to the Catholic Church from Market Street, and a further 24.3-metre stretch lies along the east side of Church Street. The boundary walls of St Peter's Church also follow the line of the old defences, and a batter, that is a slight outward lean at the base of a wall used to add structural stability and deflect projectiles, at the base of the south wall there may be an original feature. The best-preserved sections are two lengths of the west wall approaching the river: an 18-metre run heading due south from the riverbank, then, after a 5.5-metre gap, a 70-metre stretch continuing in a south-westerly direction. The wall itself survives to only about a metre in height, with narrow raised edges along both inner and outer faces that once formed a walkway for defenders. No gates, towers, or other defensive features have been identified.

The south bank sections are the most rewarding to seek out, particularly the west wall lengths near the river and the stretches incorporated into the churchyard and church boundaries along Church Street. The walls are low and easily overlooked, absorbed into later fabric, but once you know what you are looking at, the plantation grid begins to reassemble itself around you.