A rath, to use the Irish term for this type of enclosed circular or oval earthwork, was typically a farmstead of the early medieval period, its bank and fosse, the external ditch, defining a domestic space for a farming household rather than a military stronghold. The one at Wooddown, however, is a diminished version of its former self, its outline irregular where it was once oval, its bank worn down in places to little more than a low scarp in the earth.

By 1913, when the Ordnance Survey revised its 25-inch maps, the site was already recorded as an irregular-shaped earthwork, suggesting the damage had been done well before anyone thought to measure it carefully. When a formal description was made in 1970, what remained was an area roughly 28 metres from north-west to south-east and 22 metres across, enclosed by an earthen bank that had survived only along the south-south-east to north arc, and even there it stood barely a metre high on the exterior face. The southern and south-western portions had been quarried away, taking both the perimeter bank and much of the interior surface with them. A wide, shallow fosse is still traceable along the southern arc, but the original entrance has been lost entirely. A slight depression sits in the southern quadrant of the interior, its cause unrecorded. About 75 metres to the north-west lies what may be a burial mound, a separate monument that shares the same elevated ground and adds a further layer of prehistory to the spot.

What the site retains, despite the quarrying and the centuries of agricultural pressure, is its position. It sits on high enough ground to command good views of the surrounding Westmeath countryside, which was almost certainly part of its original appeal to whoever chose to build there. The earthwork remains visible on aerial photography, its irregular outline still readable from above even where it has almost dissolved at ground level.