The stone is modest in size, just under a metre and a half tall and tapering toward the top, but the marks cut along its edges belong to one of Ireland's oldest writing systems, and they name a person who has otherwise left no trace on the world.

Ogham is an early medieval script, typically carved as a series of notches and lines along the edge or face of a stone, and used primarily to record personal names, often in a formulaic pattern identifying a man by his father's name. This stone follows that convention. According to the scholar R.A.S. Macalister, writing in 1945, the inscription reads IVAGENI MAQI LAISCEMITA, which translates roughly as "of Ivagenos, son of Laiscemit". The stone was not always in Tipperary. Its original home was Mountrussell, near Kilfinnan in County Limerick, where it had presumably stood for centuries before being moved in 1947 to the grounds of Aherlow House. That hotel, built around 1928 in the Glen of Aherlow, became the stone's unlikely new setting, and it has remained there since, embedded in a flower bed to the south-east of the original building.

Visitors staying at or passing through Aherlow House can find the stone in the hotel grounds, positioned between the original building and a later extension. It rewards a close look: the ogham characters are incised along the north-west and south-west edges of the stone, so running your eye along those arrises rather than across the face is the way to pick out the inscription. The red sandstone itself, warm-coloured and slightly weathered, is easy to overlook as garden ornament until you notice the deliberate, ancient cuts along its margins.