Ogham is an early Irish script, typically carved as a series of notches and strokes along the edge of a standing stone, and the Brackloon example carried what appears to have been the formula (MA)QI MUCC(OI), a standard genealogical phrase meaning something like "son of the tribe of." By the time any scholar got to examine it properly, almost nothing legible remained.

When the antiquarian Hitchcock encountered the stone, it had already been repurposed as a chimney-breast in a cottage in Ballintermon. He was told it had originally come from a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage typically associated with an early Irish rath or ringfort, a circular enclosed farmstead of the early medieval period, in a field called Páirc an Leasa in Brackloon townland. The difficulty is that the field locally known as Páirc na Claishe, not Páirc an Leasa, is the one that fits the description, and a separate source, Windele writing in 1848, had been told the stone came from a rath in the neighbouring townland of Ballintermon entirely. To prepare the stone for its domestic role, nearly all of the inscription had been chipped away. Hitchcock recovered the fragments and presented them to the Royal Irish Academy, where they were subsequently lost or mislaid. The main stone, reduced to a single surviving letter, was later broken up and used as walling material, as recorded by Macalister in 1897. A separate fragment, found on a fence in Brackloon townland in 1891 and believed to be part of the same stone, had a rather better outcome. After spending some time in the grounds of Ballinagroun House near Inch, it eventually made its way to Músaem Chorca Dhuibhne in Baile an Fheirtéaraigh, Co. Chiarraí, where it can still be seen.