The stone bears an ogham inscription, a form of early medieval writing that uses a series of notches and strokes cut along the edge of a stone to represent letters, and this one is carved along the northern edge of its east face. That the inscription can be read at all is something of an achievement.

The stone is substantial: 2.3 metres tall, up to 1.3 metres wide at its base, and roughly rectangular both in plan and in profile, though it narrows slightly toward the top. The inscription itself reads IRCCITOS, an interpretation put forward by R. A. S. Macalister in his 1945 corpus of ogham stones, catalogued as number 168. Macalister's work remains one of the foundational references for ogham scholarship, and his reading was also accepted by Judith Cuppage in her 1986 survey of the Dingle Peninsula. The name IRCCITOS is a personal name in the genitive case, as is typical of ogham stones from this period, essentially meaning "of Irccit" and likely marking territory or commemorating an individual in the manner common to early Christian Ireland. The combination of weathering, a thick coat of lichen, and the persistent rubbing of cattle has left the inscription faint enough that arriving at any confident reading requires some effort, and the stone's location on open pastureland means that bovine interference has presumably been ongoing for centuries.