Look closely at its south-south-east edge, however, and you will find something much older: a faint ogham inscription, the lettering worn but still partially legible after perhaps fifteen centuries of Irish weather.

Ogham is an early medieval script used primarily in Ireland between roughly the fourth and seventh centuries, in which letters are represented by sets of notches and lines cut along the edge or face of a stone. The inscription here reads AFG/M(?)OLA, with one character uncertain, suggesting a personal name, as is typical of these monuments, which most commonly record a name in the genitive case, meaning something along the lines of "of" or "belonging to" a named individual. The stone itself stands 1.55 metres high and measures 0.47 by 0.37 metres in cross-section, with packing stones still visible at its base where it was set into the ground. Its long axis runs north-east to south-west. The site was catalogued by Power and colleagues in 1992 as part of a wider survey of Cork's ogham stones.