Visible in aerial photographs, it forms a U-shape aligned roughly northwest to southeast, with the rounded end of the U closing off at the southeast. A low bank and an outer fosse, meaning a ditch running along the outside of the bank rather than inside it, define an enclosed area of approximately 125 metres by 45 metres. That combination of scale and shape is what has drawn cautious attention from archaeologists, because it fits a profile that is exceedingly rare in Ireland.

A cursus is a type of Neolithic monument, the term borrowed from the Latin for "racetrack" after early antiquarians mistook similar English examples for Roman athletics grounds. They are among the least understood of all prehistoric earthworks, typically consisting of two parallel banks with ditches, sometimes stretching for kilometres, and their purpose remains genuinely contested. The Woodtown earthwork does not conform perfectly to the standard cursus template, which is part of why the official record, compiled by Paul Walsh and Padraig Clancy and uploaded in April 2015, is carefully worded: the possibility that it could be the remnants of a cursus-type monument cannot be excluded. That kind of hedged language in an archaeological inventory is itself a signal that something unusual is being described. Most earthworks get a firmer classification. This one does not.

The earthwork sits on a gently east-facing slope in undulating pasture, the sort of ground that looks unremarkable from a road. Because the bank is low, the feature is far easier to read from the air than on foot, and the clearest publicly available view comes from an oblique Google Maps aerial image taken from the south. Visitors approaching the area on the ground should not expect a dramatic or obvious landscape feature. What the site offers instead is a particular kind of quietness around an unresolved question, the sense of standing near something old enough and ambiguous enough that even the people who catalogued it preferred not to guess.