Ogham is an early medieval script, most commonly found carved along the edges of standing stones, in which a series of notches and lines running across a central stem represent letters. Here, the surviving characters have been read as SACATTINI, most likely a personal name in the genitive case, of the type typical on memorial stones of the period. The trouble is that the stone is damaged, meaning some of the inscription may already be lost, and even what survives has resisted easy reading.

The stone was discovered in 1846, built into a souterrain at Ballyhank in County Cork. A souterrain is an underground stone-lined passage or chamber, usually associated with early medieval settlements and thought to have served for storage or refuge. Using earlier carved stones as building material was not uncommon, which is why ogham stones so frequently turn up repurposed in walls, field boundaries, and underground structures rather than standing where they were first erected. At Ballyhank, whoever built the souterrain had access to at least six inscribed stones, all of which were incorporated into its fabric. The stone in question measures 1.2 metres in length and 0.5 metres by 0.25 metres in cross-section. R. A. S. Macalister, working in 1945, read the inscription as SACATTINI, but Damian McManus, revisiting the text in 1991, found both of the supposed I characters difficult to confirm. The stone is now held in the collection of the National Museum of Ireland. More recently it has been examined as part of the Ogham in 3D project run by the School of Celtic Studies at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, which uses digital scanning to record inscriptions that are faint, worn, or contested.