That it ended up in Dublin at all is a consequence of the Victorian habit of removing ancient objects from their original settings, a practice that preserved some things and severed others from their context entirely.

The stone originally stood at Aglish, County Kerry, beside a tomb in what appears to have been an early ecclesiastical site. Ogham is a script used primarily between the fourth and seventh centuries, consisting of notches and lines cut along the edges or faces of a stone, and it was typically used to record personal names, often in a formulaic pattern indicating lineage. A second ogham stone remains at Aglish to this day, but this one was removed in the mid-nineteenth century and eventually came to rest in the National Museum. What makes it particularly striking is the density of imagery compressed onto a single face: a Maltese cross enclosed within a circle, below which sits a spear or arrow-like motif, and flanking that motif on either side, a swastika. The swastika, it should be noted, had a long pre-Christian life as a symbol of good fortune across many cultures, and its appearance here is consistent with early medieval Irish decorative practice rather than anything more recent. The scholar R. A. S. Macalister, writing in 1945 as part of his comprehensive corpus of Irish ogham stones, noted two faint circular marks below the arrow stem, though these are no longer visible on the stone. He read the surviving ogham inscription, which runs inverted with respect to the cross, as: MAQI MAQ(I....O)GGODIKA, a partial genealogical formula with a section now lost.

The stone has since been documented as part of the Ogham in 3D project, run by the School of Celtic Studies at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, which has produced high-resolution three-dimensional scans of ogham stones across Ireland and beyond. The project's record for this stone, catalogued as number 141 in Macalister's corpus, is accessible through the institute's online database and offers a closer look at the surface detail than is possible in a museum setting. For anyone visiting the National Museum of Ireland, the stone rewards careful attention, particularly the layering of Christian and pre-Christian motifs on the same face, and the way the ogham inscription seems almost to argue with the cross above it, each element oriented as though the other were not there.