It is only visible at all because cattle have worn away the bank to drink, cutting a U-shaped hollow roughly eight metres across and exposing a cross-section of material that would otherwise remain entirely hidden.

What the eroded bank has revealed is a burnt mound, a type of prehistoric site found widely across Ireland and Britain. Burnt mounds typically consist of fire-cracked stone and charcoal-rich soil accumulated through repeated heating, most likely as part of a cooking or heating process in which stones were made red-hot and plunged into water-filled troughs to bring the water to a boil. They tend to cluster near water sources, which makes the riverside location here entirely consistent with how these sites were used. At Woodfield, the burnt layer runs between twenty and forty centimetres deep and lies beneath a thin covering of sod ten to fifteen centimetres thick, visible on both sides of the cattle-worn cut. A low ridge rises about fifty metres to the south-west, giving the site a sheltered aspect that would have suited a working area alongside a reliable water supply.