The site exists primarily as a ghost in the grass, a circular cropmark, the kind of faint discolouration in growing crops that reveals buried or disturbed soil beneath. Cropmarks form when subsurface features, such as filled-in ditches or collapsed walls, cause the vegetation above them to grow differently, often visible only from the air and only at certain times of year when soil moisture varies enough to produce a contrast.

The enclosure at Ballyboe was identified from an aerial photograph taken in 1970, part of the Cambridge University Collection of Aerial Photography archive. At the time the photograph was taken, the site sat on a gentle north-east-facing slope in open pasture, and a gravel ridge to the north and north-east had already been removed, presumably through agricultural clearance. What the photograph caught was the outline of a circular form in the field below, a shape that had left no trace a person walking the land would notice. Circular enclosures of this kind are relatively common across Ireland, often associated with ringforts or earlier prehistoric settlements, though the Ballyboe example has not been assigned a more specific function or date. Notably, a second circular enclosure was recorded roughly 120 metres to the west, suggesting that whatever activity once shaped this landscape, it was not isolated to a single structure.