One of those uprights is broken, yet still holds the capstone aloft at a height of around two and a half metres. The roofstone itself is considerable: 6.3 metres long, just over three metres wide, and 1.3 metres deep. For something so large to survive on a slope of ordinary farmland, within reach of a major city, is quietly remarkable.

This is a portal tomb, a type of megalithic monument typically dating to the Neolithic period, in which two tall upright stones form an entrance or portal, with a large capstone tilted across them to create a single burial chamber. The Woodtown example faces north-west and retains the essential form of that arrangement, even though one portal has fallen and lies close by at its original length of 4.4 metres. What the monument looked like in a more complete state can be partly gauged from a drawing made in 1781 by Gabriel Beranger, a Swiss-born artist who travelled Ireland documenting antiquities. His illustration, noted by Ball in 1906, shows more stones clustered around the tomb than are visible today, suggesting that the surrounding structure has been disturbed or removed in the intervening centuries. The site appears in the scholarly literature through Borlase's late nineteenth-century survey of Irish dolmens and in later work by Ó Nualláin and Turner in 1983.

The tomb sits on sloping pasture, so the ground underfoot can be uneven and wet depending on the season. The Owendoher valley setting means the surrounding landscape is relatively green and sheltered. The fallen portal stone lying beside the chamber is worth examining closely alongside the standing one, as the contrast between the two gives a sense of the original scale and arrangement. The capstone, resting at an angle on its surviving support, is best appreciated from the north-west, the direction the tomb was built to face.