What makes the northernmost stone particularly arresting is not its modest height of just over a metre, but a series of notches cut along one of its angles, close to the flat top. These have been read as an ogham inscription, ogham being an early medieval script in which letters are represented by strokes and notches carved along the edge of a stone, typically recording a personal name. The reading proposed is IARNI, a genitive form suggesting the stone once marked territory or a burial associated with a person of that name.

The scholar R. A. S. Macalister, who did more than almost anyone in the first half of the twentieth century to catalogue and interpret Ireland's ogham stones, published his reading of the inscription in 1945. He had also excavated the ground around the two monoliths as far back as 1921, though that dig produced nothing conclusive. Both stones are cut from a conglomerate rock flecked with quartz, which gives them a rough, grainy texture quite different from the smoother sandstones more commonly associated with ogham carving. The southern stone is marginally wider and has a rounded rather than flat top, and the two together, set just 0.9 metres apart, form a pairing whose original purpose remains unclear. Standing stones in Ireland were raised across a long span of prehistory and early history, and a pair aligned on a north-south axis could reflect astronomical, territorial, or funerary intentions, none of which the excavation managed to settle.