Ogham is an early medieval Irish script in which letters are represented by notches and strokes cut along the edge of a stone, typically used to record personal names. What makes this particular stone's story so striking is not the inscription itself but the casual destruction visited upon it somewhere along the way: almost the entire text was chipped off deliberately, to make the stone serviceable as a chimney-breast in a cottage in Ballintermon.

When a researcher named Hitchcock eventually tracked the stone down in that cottage, he was told it had originally come from a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage associated with a ringfort, or rath, in a field called Páirc an Leasa in Brackloon townland. A rath is a circular enclosure, usually of earthen banks, used as a farmstead in early medieval Ireland. The problem is that the field locally known by that name does not quite match the one Hitchcock was directed to, and an earlier account from Windele in 1848 placed the stone's origin in Ballintermon townland altogether. There are two known raths in Brackloon, and one of them had been levelled by the time Hitchcock made his enquiries, which fits the story but does not resolve the confusion. The chipped-off pieces of inscription were presented to the Royal Irish Academy but were subsequently lost or mislaid, and the main body of the stone, retaining just one legible letter, was later broken up for walling. The readable fragment, recovered from a fence in Brackloon in 1891, preserves enough of the text to suggest the inscription once read something close to MAQQI MUCCOI, a formulaic phrase common in ogham epigraphy indicating genealogical descent. Macalister, writing in 1897 and again in 1945, puzzled over whether the Annagap ogham stone might have been part of the same original monument, though that theory has since fallen out of favour. The fragment that survived all of this, passing through the grounds of Ballinagroun House near Inch before finding a permanent home, is now on display at the museum in Baile an Fheirtéaraigh, on the Dingle Peninsula.