Ogham is an early medieval script, used roughly between the fourth and seventh centuries, in which letters are represented by notches and strokes cut along the edge of a stone. The Ahalisky stone, measuring five feet tall and just over two feet wide, was found alongside two companion stones inside a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage typically associated with early Irish settlement sites and used for storage or refuge.

The inscription on this stone reads CUNAGUSOS MAQI MUCOI VIRAGNI, a formula familiar from early Irish epigraphy: a personal name, followed by MAQI (son of), followed by MUCOI (of the tribe or sept of), and then a tribal or ancestral name. The scholar R. A. S. Macalister catalogued it in 1945 as number 70 in his comprehensive corpus, giving the stone's dimensions and reading. Damian McManus, whose later work on ogham is considered a key reference for the script's linguistic interpretation, also discusses it. The stone no longer rests in Cork; it was removed to the National Museum of Ireland in Dublin, where it remains part of the collection. More recently, the stone was included in the Ogham in 3D project run by the School of Celtic Studies at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, which has produced detailed digital scans of ogham stones across Ireland and Britain, allowing the inscriptions to be examined with a precision that physical visits rarely permit.