What makes the stone from Coolineagh quietly remarkable is not just its age, but the circumstances of its recovery and the scholarly argument it has generated ever since. It came to light in 1838 during the demolition of an eighteenth-century Church of Ireland parish church in Aghabulloge graveyard, which means it had already survived centuries of reuse and obscurity before anyone thought to record what it said.

The stone is one of two ogham stones found at the Aghabulloge site; its companion remains in place in the graveyard, still visible where it was first identified. This one, however, is in a damaged condition, and that damage has made reading it a matter of genuine contention among scholars. R.A.S. Macalister, writing in 1945, proposed the inscription read ANM NETACUNAS CELI VIDETTAS, a formula suggesting a personal name and possibly a devotional designation. Damian McManus, however, described the first two words of that reading as "a rash reconstruction", and Patrick Power, writing as early as 1932, concluded it was "useless speculating as to the original inscription" at all. The stone thus occupies an unusual position, a genuine piece of early Irish epigraphy whose message may be permanently beyond recovery. It is now held on permanent display in the Stone Corridor at University College Cork, where it sits among a collection that makes one of the more unexpected detours available in an Irish university building.