The text, as translated by Kavanagh in 1956, reads: "Lir erected this stone; M... carved the runes." Above the second word, an equal-armed cross was pocked into the surface. That a Viking or Hiberno-Norse hand left this mark on an entrance stone in south-west Ireland is unusual enough; that the stone was set into a corbelled house on a tidal island in Valencia Harbour makes it stranger still.

Beginish Island sits at the northern end of Valencia Harbour, between Valencia Island and the mainland, and at certain low tides its south-eastern sandbar connects with the neighbouring Church Island. The settlement at Canroe, the island's highest point on its eastern end, is substantial: eight houses, fifteen cairns, eight animal shelters, and an extensive network of fields and walls, with an iron smelting site at the island's western end. When the archaeologist O'Kelly excavated here in the early 1950s, he found that what appeared to be a large mound of stone on the eastern slope of Canroe was in fact a circular corbelled house, 11 metres in external diameter, its walls standing to a maximum height of 3.5 metres above the original floor level. Corbelling is a building technique in which successive courses of stone are laid with each projecting slightly inward over the one below, producing a domed interior without mortar or timber framing; here the technique was competently executed, if rough in finish. The house was semi-subterranean, its internal floor sitting roughly a metre lower than the exterior ground level. Radial roof timbers were anchored in six oblique sockets around the interior wall-face, a small ope in the rear wall may have served as a ventilator, and a saddle quern and a rotary quern were built directly into the masonry. The floor deposit, a black carbonised layer rich in shell and bone, overlay a central hearth backed by an upright slab. A smaller rectangular structure of noticeably inferior construction was added later against the north side of the main house, and after the circular house eventually filled with sand, people continued to use the site intermittently, leaving behind rough shelters and midden debris, including a fragment of an iron knife of post-Norman type.

The runic lintel stone is no longer on the island; it is held in the Crawford Park Museum. What remains on Beginish is the wider settlement complex on Canroe, accessible only by water, with the full spread of houses, cairns, and field boundaries still legible across the eastern end of the island.