It was aerial photography in 1989 that first revealed the site's true shape: a series of concentric and spiralling ditches, known as fosses, describing a pattern so intricate that it reads less like a simple enclosure and more like a diagram of something carefully considered over time. At the centre sits a roughly circular ditch about 30 metres across; around that winds a second fosse in a spiral; and enclosing the whole arrangement is a broad oval ditch stretching approximately 150 metres in diameter. Between the outer boundaries, small fields were laid out radially, like segments of a wheel, and a possible ringfort sits to the south within the same complex.

Cropmarks of this kind appear when buried ditches, walls, or pits affect the growth of surface vegetation, becoming legible only from above, typically during dry summers when soil moisture differences show up in the colour and height of crops or grass. What makes Shanballymore particularly interesting is not just the scale but the morphology. The spiralling arrangement of fosses and the radial subdivision of space within the enclosure closely resembles a group of early medieval ecclesiastical enclosures identified elsewhere in north Cork, including those at Bawnmore North, Killeenemer, and Lag. Early church sites in Ireland were frequently enclosed within circular or oval boundaries, sometimes in multiple concentric rings that marked gradations of sacred space. The fact that Shanballymore shares both the form and the approximate dimensions of these known religious sites raises the possibility that it, too, was once a place of early Christian activity, though no above-ground trace survives to confirm it.

The site today gives nothing away to a visitor on foot. The enclosure is legible only in the photographic record, its fosses long since levelled by centuries of agriculture. What remains are the linear cropmarks of probable former field boundaries running adjacent to the complex, themselves now gone from the physical landscape, surviving only as faint seasonal impressions in the soil.