Measuring roughly nineteen metres across and just over a metre in height, it is the kind of earthwork that blends into the surrounding countryside at ground level and apparently disappears altogether when viewed from above on aerial photography. That near-invisibility is part of what makes it quietly interesting: a burial mound that has survived in the landscape for an unknown number of centuries while becoming, in practical terms, almost imperceptible.

Burial mounds of this type, rounded earthen monuments raised over the remains of the dead, were constructed across Ireland during the Bronze Age and earlier periods, though without excavation it is impossible to assign a precise date to any individual example. What the historical record does confirm is that the mound at Wooddown was legible enough in the nineteenth century to be recorded on the revised 1837 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, where it appears as a circular earthwork. By 1976, when it was described more precisely, the mound retained its domed, circular form, with no visible fosse, which is the defensive or boundary ditch that often accompanies earthen monuments. The absence of a fosse is not unusual for a burial mound as opposed to a ringfort or enclosure, though a ringfort does exist roughly seventy-five metres to the south-east, suggesting this small area of Westmeath held some concentration of significance in the early medieval period, if not earlier.