Sitting roughly 150 metres to the south-east of a neighbouring ringfort, the rath at Marley is part of a pairing, two enclosed settlements within easy sight of one another on the Galway landscape, which raises immediate questions about who lived here and how those communities related to one another.

The monument itself is oval in plan, measuring approximately 59 metres north to south and 53 metres east to west, and is defined by two earthen banks with a fosse, or ditch, running between them. This double-bank-and-fosse arrangement is characteristic of a rath, the Irish term for a roughly circular or oval enclosure built during the early medieval period, typically between the sixth and tenth centuries, and used as a farmstead by a family of some local standing. The condition is described as fair, meaning the earthworks survive well enough to read clearly in the field, though centuries of agricultural activity have left their mark. A field bank has been built directly over the outer bank on the southern side, effectively cannibalising the older structure, and another field boundary runs close outside the northern arc, suggesting that successive generations of farmers worked around and across the earlier monument without quite erasing it.