The claim comes not from an archaeologist's report but from a piece of local folklore preserved in the Schools' Collection, in which a wandering poor scholar, the kind of itinerant student common to early modern Ireland, pauses inside the old monastery, notices markings on one of the stones, and recognises them as ogham. Ogham is an early medieval script, most often carved as a series of notches and lines along the edge of a stone, and associated in Ireland broadly with the fifth to seventh centuries. According to the account, he read the inscription aloud and translated it as a declaration that treasure lay hidden behind that very stone. Whether anyone ever looked, the record does not say.

The church in question is the ruined parish church of Clonelty, set on a slightly raised area in the north-eastern quadrant of a graveyard at Ballynoe. Samuel Lewis noted in 1837 a possible dedication to St Ita, also known as Íde of Killeedy, a seventh-century saint with strong associations with County Limerick. The main fabric of the building, including its west doorway, is Romanesque in character and pre-Norman in date, making it among the older surviving ecclesiastical structures in the region. The arcade and south window appear to be later additions, possibly from the sixteenth or seventeenth century. The church and its graveyard seem to have sat within a multi-vallate Early Christian enclosure, meaning a site defined by several concentric boundary banks or ditches, a form of organisation typical of significant early ecclesiastical settlements. The ogham stone itself, if it survives at all, is believed to have been built into the church wall rather than left freestanding, which is not unusual; builders in medieval Ireland frequently reused older carved stones as convenient building material, sometimes without any awareness of what they were incorporating.

The site sits within an active or at least maintained graveyard, so access is generally possible, though the ruins themselves should be approached carefully. The stonework is old and the interior of the church is exposed to the elements. Anyone looking for the supposed ogham inscription should be prepared for the possibility that it is no longer legible, or that its presence in the wall has never been formally confirmed beyond the folklore account. The north-eastern corner of the graveyard, where the church remains stand on their slight elevation, is the area to focus on. The account in the Schools' Collection is vivid enough to have lodged itself in local memory, but the stone itself remains, for now, a matter of tradition rather than verified record.