The inscription is cut in ogham, an early medieval script in which letters are represented by groups of notches and strokes along a central stem line, often the edge of a standing stone. What makes this particular example quietly awkward is that the characters run along two diametrically opposed angles, a bold and unusual arrangement that complicates the reading even before the question of individual letters is settled.

The stone is one of fifteen ogham stones recovered from a single souterrain at Ballyknock North in County Cork. A souterrain is an underground stone-lined passage, typically associated with a ringfort, used in early medieval Ireland for storage or refuge. That fifteen inscribed stones were found together in one such structure is itself remarkable; the ringfort site at Ballyknock North is one of the more significant concentrations of ogham material in the country. This particular stone was read by the scholar R. A. S. Macalister in 1945 as CLIUCOANAS MAQI MAQI-TRENI, a formula typical of early Irish ogham inscriptions, in which "MAQI" means "son of", giving something along the lines of "Cliucoanas, son of Mac-Treni". When Damian McManus returned to the inscription in 2004, he found he could not confidently confirm several of the letters, marking them in lower case and placing one in brackets, CLIUCOANAS MAQi MAQi-TR[E]Ni, a small notation that signals genuine uncertainty rather than a clean reading. The gap between those two transcriptions, separated by sixty years of scholarship, is a reminder of how provisional our hold on these early voices can be.

The stone is on permanent display in the Stone Corridor at University College Cork, where several of the Ballyknock North stones can be seen together. The corridor itself is accessible within the university's main quadrangle, making it one of the more straightforward places in Ireland to encounter early medieval inscriptions without a muddy field or a locked gate standing between the visitor and the object.