The enclosure is almost perfectly subcircular, measuring roughly 27 metres north to south and 25.5 metres east to west, with a fosse, or defensive ditch, cut between the two banks. What catches the eye, apart from the sheer intactness of the earthworks, is the way the surrounding field boundaries seem to radiate outward from the monument, as though the landscape organised itself around this point and then simply never forgot it.

This is a rath, the most common type of early medieval settlement monument in Ireland. Raths were typically the enclosed farmsteads of prosperous families, the banks and fosse providing a degree of security for livestock as much as for people. Most were built and occupied somewhere between the fifth and twelfth centuries, though individual sites vary considerably. At Woodfield, a narrow gap roughly two metres wide at the south-east may represent the original entrance, a detail noted by Knight around 1975. The preservation here is notably good; the double-bank arrangement, known as a bivallate rath, is less common than the single-banked variety and suggests the enclosure belonged to someone of some local standing.