A killeen, in Irish tradition, is an unconsecrated burial ground, often used for unbaptised infants or others denied formal church burial, and it was in one such place that this four-foot stone was recorded, carved with a rough cross set within a circle. It is gone now, with no visible remains surviving, which places it in that particular category of Irish antiquity: the site whose interest lies almost entirely in the record of its disappearance.

Ogham is an early medieval script, typically carved as a series of notches and strokes along the edge of a standing stone, and used primarily to record personal names, often in commemoration of the dead. The scholar John Windele, working in the nineteenth century, managed to recover an inscription from this stone before its condition deteriorated beyond reading. He read it as COVTET, a personal name in the genitive form typical of ogham commemorative formulae. By the time Crawford noted the stone in 1912, the damage was severe: fire had destroyed the greater part of the original surface, leaving only the upper portion with a few broad, shallow grooves that were thought to be artificial remnants of the original carving. Macalister, writing in 1902, had already drawn on Windele's earlier work, suggesting the stone had been studied by at least two generations of antiquarians as its condition worsened. A second possible ogham stone survives approximately 750 metres to the south, hinting that this part of Kerry may once have had a modest concentration of such monuments.