Ogham is an early medieval Irish script in which letters are represented by groups of notches and lines cut along the edge of a stone, typically used to mark graves or commemorate individuals. Here, though, the stones are not isolated monuments; they frame a penitential station, a site where pilgrims would traditionally perform acts of devotion, often walking a prescribed route and reciting prayers at fixed points.

The stone on the north-east side of the cairn stands just over a metre tall and carries an inscription along one of its edges reading VAITEVIA, as recorded by the scholar R.A.S. Macalister in 1945. Macalister observed that there was no sign the inscription had ever extended further, suggesting VAITEVIA was always the complete text, not a fragment of something longer. By 1952, the archaeologist M.J. O'Kelly noted the lettering had become faint, a reminder of how slowly but steadily these outdoor carvings lose their legibility. The name or word VAITEVIA has no straightforward modern Irish equivalent, and its meaning remains opaque, which is not unusual for ogham inscriptions where the named individual or the formula used can resist easy interpretation across the intervening centuries.