The inscribed one carries ogham, an early medieval writing system that uses a series of notches and strokes cut along a central stem line, most often to record a personal name in the genitive case. It has since been moved to the village of Donard, a few kilometres away, where it can be seen today.

When the scholar R. A. S. Macalister examined the stone in 1897, he was candid about its condition, describing the inscription as "much worn and damaged" and noting that once the text turned onto the top face of the stone, "nothing definite can be stated". What he could read, he transcribed as IAQINI KOI MAQI MUC, with the remainder lost to erosion. The formula MAQI, meaning "son of" in Old Irish, is a standard feature of ogham memorial inscriptions, suggesting this stone once commemorated a named individual in the conventional manner of early Christian Ireland. The stone's original proximity to the uninscribed pillar in Ballylion Lower was first noted by Price and recorded more precisely by Macalister in 1945 as one foot six inches, roughly 0.45 metres. Whether the two stones were deliberately paired, or whether the association was incidental, is not known. The rectangular block itself measures 1.52 metres by 0.68 metres by 0.53 metres, substantial enough to have commanded attention in any period. More recently, the stone was included in the Ogham in 3D project, run by the School of Celtic Studies at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, which uses digital scanning to document surviving inscriptions and make them accessible to researchers working with stones whose surfaces have become too degraded to read reliably in person.