It has never been excavated, never been signposted, and for most of living memory it went entirely unnoticed at ground level. The only reason anyone knows it is there at all is because crops betray it from the air.

The enclosure first came to light in an aerial photograph taken in 1971, catalogued as FSI 3.513/512, which captured a cropmark tracing its circular outline across the field. Cropmarks form when buried features, such as ditches or walls, cause the vegetation above them to grow differently, either more vigorously over a filled ditch or more sparsely over a buried wall, making the underlying archaeology legible only from altitude. The site was later confirmed on Ordnance Survey colour vertical photography and is also visible on Bing satellite imagery, where it appears as a substantial sub-circular enclosure extending from the southern field boundary and containing within it a smaller sub-rectangular enclosure. At ground level, the southeast corner of the field holds a series of undulations and a definite oval rise, measuring approximately 14 metres east to west and 20 metres north to south, with the occasional large stone breaking the surface. The research was compiled by Geraldine Stout and updated by Christine Baker, with the record uploaded to the national monuments database in January 2015.

What makes Westereave particularly interesting to anyone willing to look is how crowded this patch of north County Dublin turns out to be with similar sites. Immediately north within the same field sits another circular enclosure, and to the west, in the adjacent field, a newly identified ring ditch, a shallow circular trench typically associated with Bronze Age burial, has been recorded, with a second ring ditch in the field beyond that. The Westereave enclosure itself is not accessible in any formal sense; it lies within active farmland and there is no public path to it. The oval rise in the field corner is subtle enough that without prior knowledge of what to look for, a walker would likely cross it without pausing. The site is best appreciated through the aerial and satellite imagery that revealed it in the first place, where the geometry of an ancient boundary, patient and circular, still holds its shape beneath the turned earth.