It originated not in Dublin at all, but in Derk, County Kerry, and what makes it particularly curious is not the journey it made from the south-west of the country to the capital, but the question of whether the marks carved along its edge were ever really what they appear to be.

Ogham is an early medieval script, used primarily in Ireland between roughly the fourth and seventh centuries, in which letters are represented by a series of notches and strokes cut along the edge of a standing stone, read from bottom to top. This particular stone, measuring three feet eight inches in height and tapering to a point at the base, carries an inscription that the archaeologist R.A.S. Macalister, writing in 1945, read tentatively as "Maqi-Aira(l?) maq Maq-Trenn(i?)" — a formula typical of early Irish memorial stones, recording a name and lineage. The problem, as Macalister noted bluntly, lies in what he called the stone's "orthographical eccentricities": the spelling does not sit comfortably within the conventions of genuine ogham inscriptions. He also observed that the physical stone itself, slaty and irregularly shaped, is not the kind of material an ogham carver would ordinarily select. His conclusion was unambiguous: he was, in his own words, "quite sceptical as to the authenticity of this inscription."

The stone is held in the National Museum of Ireland on Kildare Street in Dublin, which maintains significant archaeological collections including many ogham stones of uncontested provenance. Visitors interested in early medieval epigraphy will find it worth asking staff about access to relevant parts of the collection, as display arrangements can change. The stone's unusual profile, broader at the top and narrowing downward, makes it visually distinctive even among its neighbours, and knowing in advance that its very legitimacy has been questioned gives the faint notches along its edge a rather different quality of attention.