The others were taken. This lone survivor, re-erected at some point after it had fallen flat, stands 1.76 metres high on the summit of the mound, tapering from a broad base to a narrow crown, damaged along one edge and at the top, but still legible enough to have kept scholars arguing over its inscription for well over a century.

The site, known in Irish as Cill Mhic Uíleáin, was essentially hidden until a storm at the end of the eighteenth century scoured the mound and exposed what lay within: seven ogham stones, a possible fragment of an eighth, a cross-inscribed stone, slab-lined graves, quantities of bone, and the ruins of several houses. Ogham is an early medieval script, used primarily in Ireland between roughly the fourth and seventh centuries, in which letters are represented by groups of notches and scores cut along the edge of a stone. John Windele, who documented the site in 1838, sketched the stones arranged in a rough semi-circle at the top of the mound, with a grave nearby. Within a few decades, Lord Ventry had removed six of them. Four of those were set along the driveway of Burnham House, now Colaiste Íde, between Dingle and Ventry; the remaining two ended up in the grounds of Chute Hall near Tralee. The stone left at Ballinrannig carries an inscription read by R.A.S. Macalister in 1945 as CUNAMAQQI CORBBI MAQQ(I MUCCOI DOVVINIA)S, a formula typical of early Irish commemorative stones, recording descent and tribal affiliation. The section in parentheses is conjectural, reconstructed from a damaged edge where only traces survive.

The stone has since been included in the Ogham in 3D project run by the School of Celtic Studies at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, which produces high-resolution three-dimensional models of ogham inscriptions, allowing the marks to be examined in detail regardless of weathering or damage. That work has given this battered and largely forgotten stone a second life of sorts, readable again in ways that standing in a field beside it may no longer allow.