Ogham, the early medieval Irish script that encodes names and lineages as a series of notches and strokes cut along the edge of a stone, was often practical, private, or both. What makes this particular stone quietly remarkable is how it was found: not standing in a field or built into a church wall, but doing structural work underground, propped upright inside a souterrain to support a lintel. A souterrain is a man-made underground passage, usually associated with a nearby ringfort and used for storage or refuge. This stone had been repurposed as a building material, its inscription presumably of less interest to whoever needed a roof over their tunnel than the fact that it was 1.75 metres long and solid.

The stone originally came from Knockshanawee in County Cork, where it was one of six ogham stones discovered together in a souterrain attached to a ringfort. That concentration of six inscribed stones in a single underground structure is itself unusual. The inscription on this particular stone has been read by successive scholars with only minor disagreement. Macalister, writing in 1945, and McManus, in 2004, both transcribed it as VEQIKAMI MAQI LUGUNI, a formula typical of ogham stones that records a personal name followed by the word for "son of" and a father's name. Power, in an earlier 1932 reading, substituted a C for the K in the first word. These are small divergences of the kind that arise when scholars work from worn stone edges, and the core meaning, a named individual identified through his father, remains consistent across all three readings. The stone now rests in Cork City, displaced from the ringfort and souterrain where it spent centuries quietly holding something up.