Split lengthwise along its body, it has lost the opening of its inscription entirely, leaving scholars to work with whatever survived the break. What remains, read along what Macalister called the sinister angle, is the ogham formula MAQI RECTA. Ogham is an early medieval Irish script in which letters are encoded as a series of notches and strokes cut along the edge or face of a stone, most commonly recording a personal name in a genealogical phrase meaning "son of". Here, the surviving fragment likely preserves part of such a lineage, though the name it once began with is gone.

The stone, catalogued by the National Museum under the accession number 1885:432, is believed to have come from the graveyard at Knockane, known in Irish as Teampall an Chnocáin, situated on a gentle rise east of the Gaddagh river near Killorglin in County Kerry. The site itself has a long history of religious use. Ó Cíobháin linked it to a parish church mentioned in Papal Annates of 1433, 1479, 1487, and 1511, and by 1615 a Royal Visitation recorded it as "up and well". In 1633, a minister named Willmus Lane held the incumbency here alongside the parish of Dunlo. The graveyard also served as the burial ground of the Macgillycuddy's of the Reeks, a branch of the O'Sullivan Mores, the same family associated with the nearby Dromaloughane castle. A nineteenth-century Protestant church now stands to the north of the medieval remains, layering the centuries into a relatively small piece of ground.

The precise provenance of the ogham stone is not entirely settled. Rhys, drawing on the earlier work of Graves, placed its discovery in a churchyard "near Killorglin", while Macalister, also citing Graves, was more specific, recording that it was first seen standing in the churchyard at Knockane. Whether it was always there or was brought in from elsewhere is unclear. What is certain is that it left the site long before living memory, and the fractured inscription it carries is all that remains of a dedication that was already ancient when the medieval church above it was still in use.