Nothing about the setting signals its significance. It looks, from a distance, like the kind of unassuming boundary marker that punctuates rural Irish farmland everywhere. But cut into the southeast corner, in the ancient script known as ogham, is a personal name that has survived roughly fifteen centuries of Irish weather.

Ogham is an early medieval alphabet in which letters are represented by a series of notches and strokes carved along the edge or face of a stone, read from bottom to top. The inscription here was recorded by the scholar R. A. S. Macalister in 1945, who read it as [A]NM CASONI [MAQ]I RODAGNI. The word anm means "name" in Old Irish, a formula common in ogham inscriptions, and maqqi is the archaic genitive of "son", making the text read roughly as "the name of Cason, son of Rodagn". These were real people, most likely of local significance in the early Christian period, commemorated in a script that was already becoming obsolete even as it was being used. Macalister's reading, published in his monumental catalogue of Irish ogham stones, remains the primary record of what the stone says, because the inscription itself has not fared well. By the time of a later survey, the text had become faint and heavily lichen-covered, with only a few scores still discernible to the eye.