The Ordnance Survey map of 1838 recorded a circular enclosure here, the kind of roughly ringfort-shaped earthwork that dots the Irish countryside and typically dates to the early medieval period, roughly 500 to 1000 AD. Ringforts, known in Irish as raths or lios, were enclosed farmsteads, their banks and ditches marking out a family's living space and livestock area. Whatever stood at Drishaghaun has since been levelled entirely, leaving no visible surface traces in the field as it now stands.

The 1838 Ordnance Survey mapping of Ireland was a remarkable undertaking, the first large-scale systematic survey of the entire country, and it captured many features of the landscape that were already ancient at the time and have since disappeared. The circular enclosure at Drishaghaun was one such feature, noted by surveyors and committed to the record before agricultural improvement, land clearance, or simple erosion removed it from the visible world. A local survey of the Ballinrobe district, compiled by D. Lavelle in 1994, catalogued the site, but by that point there was nothing left to inspect beyond the cartographic evidence.

There is nothing to see at Drishaghaun today, and that is precisely what makes it worth knowing about. The site is a reminder that the Irish archaeological landscape is substantially a ghost landscape, one where the map sometimes preserves what the ground no longer does.