When it was first recorded, only the top 45 centimetres of it broke the surface of the peat-covered hillside on the southern flank of a rocky spur running east from Bentee mountain in south Kerry. The rest was buried, silent, and effectively lost. A report in The Kerryman from May 1939 prompted it to be dug out, and the stone, an irregular sandstone pillar now standing 1.2 metres high, was revealed in full for the first time in centuries.

Ogham is an early Irish script, typically carved as a series of notches and lines along the edge of a stone, used mainly between the fourth and seventh centuries to record names, often in a commemorative or territorial formula. The inscription here was read by the scholar R.A.S. Macalister in 1945 as ANM CALUMANN MAQ, the word ANM meaning "name" in Old Irish, followed by the personal name Calumann and the beginning of the word for "son of". The rest of the name that followed has not survived legibly. Macalister's reading is now only partially verifiable: the initial vowel notch is no longer apparent, one notch of the U in Calumann has worn away, and only four grooves of what he transcribed as Q remain, raising the possibility that the letter was originally a C. The stone sits close to the boundary of three townlands, Canburrin, Killoe, and Killogrone, and roughly 530 metres north-west of a known ecclesiastical site at Killogrone, a proximity that hints at the layered, long-inhabited nature of this corner of the Iveragh Peninsula.