The inscription reads, in one early transcription, as LIR. RISTI. STIN. ThINA, followed by a second line naming a carver of the runes. Above the second word, an equal-armed cross has been pocked into the surface, a small detail that places the stone at the intersection of Norse and Christian worlds. Kavanagh, working with O'Kelly in 1956, translated the text as "Lir erected this stone; M... carved the runes," and dated it to somewhere between 1000 and 1100 AD.

The identity of whoever commissioned the stone has since become a matter of some scholarly dispute. The first word of the inscription, read by Kavanagh as the Irish name Lir, was challenged by the Norwegian runologist Johnsen in 1968, who argued that the letters more plausibly represent VERR, a straightforwardly Old Norse personal name. A later group of specialists, Barnes, Hagland and Page, writing in 1997, proposed yet another reading: UIR. In a 2001 article in the Journal of Irish Archaeology titled "A Viking Age Maritime Haven," researchers Sheehan, Stummann Hansen and O Corráin reviewed these competing interpretations and concluded that the runic specialists ought to be preferred over the earlier O'Kelly and Kavanagh reading, on the reasonable grounds that runology is a narrow discipline and expertise within it carries weight. Whether the stone commemorates an Irishman, a Norseman, or someone whose identity resists easy classification remains unresolved. That ambiguity is part of what makes it interesting: a piece of stone from Cork's Viking-age past that still refuses to give up a straightforward answer. The stone is held at Cork Public Museum as registered object L286.