Learn English – Nouns of plural form preceding another noun

There is a cross-linguistic principle that words incorporated into compounds tend to lose any inflections (I remember an article in Language in the 80's - probably, from the index, one of the articles in Vol 62 No 1, but I haven't a copy to hand).

So in English, the norm is that nouns incorporated into compounds do not take a plural ending. Where they do, this is usually because the singular form would be ambiguous, often because there is a homophonous adjective. An example I recall is "solid modelling" - the company I worked for in the 80's used this phrase (in the UK, hence the spelling of "modelling"), but other vendors preferred "solids modeling", presumably because they thought that "solid modelling" might be a solid kind of modelling, as opposed to the modelling of solids.

[This answer relates solely to British English. I'm not sure whether wood is used in this sense in American English.]

Chambers defines this meaning of wood as follows:

wood noun
3. (also woods) an expanse of growing trees.

showing that it can be used as singular or plural.

We would not say:

There is a woods near our house.

You could say:

There is a wood near our house.
There is a small wood near our house.
There are some woods near our house.
(This doesn't necessarily imply multiple discrete areas of woodland, but could mean the same as "a wood".)

The terminology is imprecise, but would depend, for example, on whether you are talking about :

1. a single area of trees, completely separate from any other areas of trees, for example, a group of trees in an urban or barren area; or
2. an area of trees on the edge of the countryside, which may merge into a larger area of woodland.

In case 1., you may well call it a wood, but in case 2., some woods would be a better description.