Ogham itself is a script made up of notches and lines cut along the edge of a stone, used primarily between the fourth and seventh centuries to record names and lineages, most often in an early form of Irish. The souterrain, an underground stone-lined tunnel typically used for storage or refuge, swallowed these inscribed monuments whole, preserving them by accident rather than by intent.

The Ballyknock site in County Cork yielded fifteen such stones in total, and this particular example, a claystone slab measuring four feet two inches in height and roughly fourteen inches by eight inches in cross-section, is among them. Its inscription is weathered and lightly incised, which has made reading it a matter of scholarly disagreement. R. A. S. Macalister, writing in 1945, interpreted the text as DRUTIQULI MAQI MAQI-RODAGNI, a formula typical of ogham stones where "MAQI" means "son of" in Primitive Irish, suggesting a genealogical statement of the kind: X, son of the son of Y. Damian McManus, working from the same stone decades later in 2004, could recover far less, rendering it as little more than fragments: D[ ]g[ ]Te/iQUL[ ]Q. The gap between those two readings reflects both the stone's condition and the inherent difficulty of ogham epigraphy, where a single worn notch can collapse an entire interpretation.

The stone is no longer in Cork countryside. It has been on permanent display in the Stone Corridor at University College Cork, where it sits among other ogham stones in one of the more unusual academic corridors in Ireland, a passageway lined with early medieval inscriptions that most visitors to the campus walk past without a second thought.