It is easy to overlook, modest in its dimensions, but the marks cut into it span well over a millennium of use, layered one on top of another in a way that makes the stone something of an accidental record of changing belief.

The stone carries an ogham inscription, ogham being the early medieval script in which letters are represented by groups of notches and strokes cut along a central stem line, used predominantly in Ireland between roughly the fourth and seventh centuries. The inscription here reads S(I)D(A)N(I) M(A)Q(I) DALA, a formula meaning roughly "of Sidán, son of Dal", the kind of commemorative text common to ogham stones across Munster. Much of it has deteriorated badly, and several scores have disappeared entirely or survive only in part; the letters in brackets represent readings proposed by the scholar R.A.S. Macalister in his 1945 corpus of Irish ogham inscriptions. At some later point, the western face of the stone was reworked to carry not one cross but three. A cross-in-circle dominates the face, its stem extending below the circle to form a second cross below. Above the circle sits a third, plainer cross, the head of which appears to reach the top edge of the stone via an additional groove. Whether that groove was cut as part of the same Christian reworking, or whether it predates the cross and was simply incorporated into it, remains an open question. The stone was, in other words, taken from one cultural moment and pressed into service for another, and the boundary between those two moments has not entirely resolved itself.