It only came to light in 1827, when the chancel of the medieval parish church of St Mary's in Gowran, County Kilkenny, was demolished to make way for a new Church of Ireland building. Whoever laid those foundations had simply slotted the stone in among the other material, face down or sideways, with no apparent concern for what was written on it.

Ogham is an alphabet used primarily between roughly the fourth and seventh centuries, in which letters are rendered as groups of strokes cut along the edge of a stone. The Gowran stone, standing just over one and a half metres tall, carries its inscription along two edges, running upward on both. Despite some chipping, the text is in reasonably good condition. A large cross potent, a cross whose four arms each end in a T-shape, was also cut into what was originally the base of the inscribed face, though whoever carved it did so at a slight angle. Scholars have read the inscription as recording a name in the standard ogham formula of ancestry: something close to MAQI-ERACIAS MAQI DIMAQA MUCO, meaning roughly "son of Eracias, son of Dimaqa, of the tribe of...", with the final portion lost to damage. The reading was worked out by R.A.S. Macalister in 1945 and later revised slightly by Damian McManus in 1997, with both versions leaving portions in brackets to indicate letters that are uncertain or missing.

The stone is currently on display inside the former Church of Ireland building in Gowran, which gives it a quietly layered setting: an object that predates Christianity by several centuries, later carved with a Christian symbol, then buried inside a medieval church, and now housed in a nineteenth-century one.