Ogham is an early medieval script, used mainly between the fourth and seventh centuries, in which letters are represented by a series of notches and scores cut along the edge of a stone, typically recording a person's name and parentage. This particular example, now held at Cork Public Museum under reference L188, measures just 0.3 by 0.1 metres and is only four centimetres thick. The readable portion of its inscription runs TA)Q MAQ(I, a fragment of a formula that would once have named an individual as the son of someone else, but the letters at either end are gone, and with them, the names themselves.

The stone's journey to Cork was not entirely straightforward. In 1940, University College Cork purchased it from a Mr Garret Fitzgerald, who recorded its origin as Parkalassa Fort in the townland of Annagap. No ringfort of that name is actually known in the townland, but the northern half of a large enclosure nearby, known as Lisnakilla or Lios na Cille, was in Fitzgerald's ownership, and the current landowner has confirmed that the stone came from there. Lisnakilla is a subrectangular enclosure sitting on a north-east facing slope less than a kilometre north of Anascaul, roughly two hundred metres west of the Owenascaul river. Within it are the foundations of several rectangular house sites, and a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage often used for storage or refuge, was discovered in the south-west sector at some point in the past, though it leaves no visible trace today. It is the kind of site that holds considerably more than it shows, and the ogham stone, however it came to be separated from it, is likely the most legible remnant of what was once a settled and inscribed landscape.