Ogham is an early medieval script, most commonly found in Ireland and parts of Britain, in which letters are represented by groups of notches or scores cut along the edge of a stone. What makes this particular example unusual is that the stone itself almost certainly predates the writing on it by a considerable stretch of time.

R. A. S. Macalister, the scholar who catalogued hundreds of Irish ogham stones in the first half of the twentieth century, examined this stone and read the inscription on the right-hand edge of its east face as ANM SAINA MAG OGALA MUCOI TEMOCA, a formula typical of early Irish memorial or territorial inscriptions. The stone stands about two metres high and is one of a pair; Macalister noted in 1945 that a possible third stone had reportedly stood here until around 1870. The long axis of the stone runs northeast to southwest, an orientation consistent with prehistoric standing stones rather than early Christian grave markers, and the broader landscape supports this reading: the site sits within a cluster of prehistoric monuments. The working interpretation is that the stone alignment came first, and the ogham inscription was carved onto it at a later point, probably to assert land ownership or mark a territorial boundary. By the early 1980s, when the site was examined again, only faint traces of the final four letters remained, described as knife-cut scores in the characteristic style of Cork oghams, vague but recognisably genuine.

The stone sits in pasture on a south-facing slope on the north side of the Mealagh River valley, a quiet agricultural landscape rather than an archaeological showpiece. The inscription that Macalister read with some confidence in the mid-twentieth century had already been damaged at some point after 1845, and successive decades have been unkind to what remained. A visitor today would be looking at a prehistoric standing stone where an act of territorial inscription was once made, and then quietly unmade by time.