The site is listed as a monument, which tells us it has been recognised as something worth preserving, but the particulars of its age, its denomination, its builders, and its current condition have not yet been made available through the usual channels.

The townland name offers a small clue. Shanballybeg derives from the Irish "An Seanbhaile Beag", meaning the small old town or settlement, suggesting a place with a long history of habitation. Churches in such townlands across Connacht range from early medieval foundations, sometimes little more than a roofless shell or a scatter of dressed stone in a field, through to post-medieval Catholic or Church of Ireland buildings that served rural parishes into the nineteenth or twentieth century. Without further detail, it is not possible to say which category this particular structure belongs to, or whether any walls still stand at all.