Above ground, the fragment measures just 0.42 metres high, and of the inscription that was once carved along its edge, only a handful of characters survive: the partial sequence ...V MAQI[... The V itself was below ground level on the last recorded visit, leaving little more than a ghost of a formula that would once have named a person and their parentage. Ogham is an early medieval script in which letters are represented by groups of notches and strokes cut along the edge of a stone, most often recording a name in the genitive case followed by MAQI, meaning "son of". Here, even that minimal structure is barely legible.

The stone was discovered in the 1940s by the Tralee field club, along with a companion stone, in a nearby burial ground recorded on historical Ordnance Survey maps as Killeen Old Burial Ground. A killeen, in Irish tradition, was typically an unconsecrated burial plot used for unbaptised infants and others excluded from the churchyard, and their association with early inscribed stones is not unusual. Both stones were subsequently moved to a modern enclosure at Ardcanaght, where they now sit beside a standing stone decorated with rock art. The damaged stone's losses are considerable: the bottom portion is entirely gone, and roughly half of the inscribed edge of what survives has been lost with it. R. A. S. Macalister catalogued it in 1945, noting the extent of the damage, and the fragment has since been recorded as part of the "Ogham in 3D" project run by the School of Celtic Studies at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, which uses photogrammetry and three-dimensional modelling to document surviving ogham inscriptions across Ireland.