Ogham, the early medieval Irish script in which letters are represented by notches and scores cut along the edge of a stone, was typically used to mark burials or assert lineage. The stone from Garraundarragh in County Kerry manages to be contentious on almost every point: its precise findspot, the context in which it was discovered, and even the name of the townland where it lay have all generated disagreement among the scholars who handled it.

The stone was unearthed in June 1893 by a Mr M'Quin of Gortatlea, on what was described as an outlying farm at a place he called Gurrane, a name that does not correspond to any townland in the immediate area. The likeliest candidate, established by later investigation in 2006, is Garraundarragh, which lies just south of Gortatlea. Even the findspot within that townland was disputed. Writing in 1895, the scholar Graves placed the stone in the outer ring of a rath, a type of enclosed early medieval settlement typically defined by earthen banks, noting that it had been projecting inwards from the western side of the embankment and had probably once stood upright. R. A. S. Macalister, writing in 1945, recorded instead that it came from a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage sometimes associated with raths, though he gave no source for this claim. The 2006 investigation came down on the side of the rath. After its discovery the stone was moved to a garden at Gortatlea before being transferred to the National Museum of Ireland in Dublin, where it now resides. Macalister measured it at between 1.12 and 1.19 metres high, wider at the top than the base, and recorded its inscription as DUMELI MAQI GLASICONAS NIOTTA COBRANOR[IGAS], a formula typical of early ogham stones in announcing one person's name followed by the word for "son of" and a father's or kinsman's name. The inscription itself is unusually complex in its routing, running up one angle, turning across the summit, and then continuing up a second angle on the reverse side. The stone has since been digitally recorded as part of the Ogham in 3D project run by the School of Celtic Studies at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies.