What made it curious was an inscription that scholars spent years trying to read, generally concluding it was Latin and recorded the name "Margit". The stone's location was already striking, sitting some 340 metres north of the Baginbun linear earthwork, a low bank and ditch that marks one of the most consequential landings in Irish history. But the inscription itself was the real puzzle, because it bore a close resemblance to lettering on a stone at Fethard Castle, roughly 1.8 kilometres to the north-north-west, and to a cross at Carew in Pembrokeshire, Wales.

The stone came to light around 1880, and debate over its age and meaning rumbled through the scholarly literature for decades afterwards. P. D. Vigors, writing in 1897, was among those who accepted the Latin reading and the name "Margit". Then came the sceptics. Lynn, writing in 1904 and 1905, questioned whether the stone was genuinely ancient at all. Orpen, engaging with the same question, took a nuanced position: he was fairly confident that the Fethard inscription was a nineteenth-century copy of the Welsh stone at Carew, but was more inclined to grant the Baginbun stone some antiquity. Later assessment has not been so generous, and the current view is that both the Wexford stones are probably nineteenth-century copies of the Pembrokeshire original, making them curious artefacts of antiquarian enthusiasm rather than medieval survivals. Around 1980, the stone was removed from its exposed cliff-top position and taken to a nearby house for safekeeping. By that point, only faint traces of the inscription remained, the letters worn to near-nothing by weather and time, or possibly never deeply cut to begin with.