Ogham is an early medieval script used primarily in Ireland and parts of Britain, in which letters are represented by groups of notches or lines cut along the edge of a stone. Most ogham stones follow a predictable convention, with the inscription beginning at the base and running upward. This one, measuring roughly 1.8 metres in length, does something unusual: the inscription begins at the top and reads downward, a reversal that puzzled everyone who examined it.

The text, much worn, runs along the edge and across the top of the stone, and has been read as SANGTI LLOTETI AVI SRUSA, meaning something close to "the grave of Sangti Lloteti, descendant of Srusa." The element SAnTI has been linked by the scholar R.A.S. Macalister to the Latin word sancti, suggesting Christian influence, though the stone bears no cross. John Rhys, who examined the stone in person in the late nineteenth century, offered a slightly different reading and a striking explanation for the anomalous starting point: he believed the person who cut the inscription was working from a copy made on a stick and simply began at the wrong end, unaware of the convention. That the inscriber may have been, in Rhys's own word, ignorant of what he was transcribing adds a rather human dimension to an already puzzling object. A piece of local tradition recorded by the antiquarian John Windele sits alongside the scholarly debate with its own peculiar logic: a man named Murphy told Windele that two consecutive children of the same mother, kept entirely silent until the age of nine and then brought into Kinard graveyard, would spontaneously speak the language of these inscriptions. Macalister noted the resemblance to the ancient experiment attributed to the Egyptian pharaoh Psammetichus, who reportedly isolated newborns to discover which language humans would speak naturally. By 2011, a graveyard survey confirmed the stone is no longer in its original position, lying horizontally on the ground surface rather than upright as it would once have stood.