The inscription runs along the east face of the stone, rendered in ogham, an early medieval script in which letters are represented by groups of notches and lines cut along a central stem, most commonly along a stone's edge or ridge. What survives here has been read as fragments: something ending in OTTINN, followed by MAQI, the ogham word for "son of", and then the partial name VEC(R). It is the grammar of lineage, the kind of inscription that once announced who a person was and whose child they were, now worn down to a partial whisper.

The scholar R. A. S. Macalister catalogued this stone in 1945, working through Ireland's ogham corpus with painstaking attention, and it is his reading of the Lomanagh inscription that remains the reference point. The stone stands orientated north to south in level pasture on the eastern side of the Slaheny River valley, a quiet and unassuming setting for something so old. What makes the situation slightly more tantalising is the evidence of possible loss. A shallow depression on the upper left side of the east face, and a missing section at the lower left corner of the same face, suggest that further ogham characters may once have occupied those areas. Whether through weathering, damage, or some older interference, those portions are gone, and with them whatever remained of the name or formula they once held.