That is the quiet indignity at the heart of what was found at Carhoovauler: an ogham stone, one of three, repurposed as an upright support for a roofing slab inside a souterrain, the kind of narrow underground passage, typically stone-lined, that early medieval communities in Ireland used for storage or refuge. The inscription survived the demotion, at least partially, reading CONANN M[AQI]S..., with the rest lost or damaged.

Ogham is Ireland's earliest form of writing, a script made up of notches and strokes cut along the edge of a stone, most commonly recording personal names in an early form of Irish. The formula here, CONANN MAQI, follows a pattern seen on hundreds of such stones across Munster: a name followed by MAQI, meaning "son of". Scholar R. A. S. Macalister, cataloguing the stone in 1945, noted its dimensions as roughly two and a half feet long and less than a foot wide, and identified it as having been deliberately broken to a size convenient for its secondary use as a building support in entrance chamber one of the souterrain. The fact that all three ogham stones at Carhoovauler were found within the same underground structure suggests the souterrain was built, or modified, at a point when the original commemorative function of the stones was either forgotten or simply no longer valued.