That stone is now gone, and what remains is a single drawing, a disputed reading, and the question of what the inscription ever meant. It is, in its way, a more interesting kind of monument than one you can simply visit.

The stone was found in the nineteenth century by Cork antiquarians inside a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage associated with a ringfort, at Burnfort in County Cork. Souterrains were typically used for storage or refuge, and they occasionally preserved earlier objects that had been incorporated into their structure. This one yielded an ogham stone measuring roughly 1.68 metres tall, 0.48 metres wide, and 0.2 metres thick. In 1835 it was deposited in the museum of the Royal Cork Institution. There it apparently remained until the Institution's building was demolished and replaced by the Athenaeum in 1853, after which the stone cannot be traced. Before it disappeared, however, the antiquarian John Windele made a careful drawing of it. The scholar R.A.S. Macalister, working from that drawing, read the inscription as SAGITTARI, a Latin genitive form suggesting the name or epithet of an archer. That reading was disputed throughout the nineteenth century, and without the original stone the argument cannot now be resolved. About 900 metres to the northwest lie the Greenhill ogham stones, a pair of inscribed standing stones that have fared rather better, and which give some sense of what the Burnfort stone might once have looked like in context.