What makes it quietly remarkable is not just the ogham script carved along its edge, but a detail near the top: an hourglass-shaped hole bored through the stone, roughly seven centimetres across, whose original function remains a matter of quiet speculation. Stones with such perforations appear occasionally in early medieval Irish ecclesiastical contexts, sometimes associated with oath-swearing or ritual touching, though no single explanation commands universal agreement.

Ogham is an early medieval script, used mainly between the fourth and seventh centuries, in which letters are represented by groups of notches and strokes cut along the edge of a stone. This stone's primary inscription reads ANM M(AI)LE INBIR MACI BROCANN, meaning roughly "the name of Máel Inbir, son of Brocan", a personal commemoration of the kind common to early Christian Ireland. The AI of MAILE survives now as only four notches, though the spacing of the remaining cuts confirms the fuller reading was intended. A second inscription on the southern face of the stone, possibly older than the first, can be read either as ANM or as M(A)Q(I), that is, either the memorial formula "name of" or the word for "son of", and the ambiguity has not been resolved. The stone sits within the wider Kilmalkedar ecclesiastical complex, a site sheltered by the spurs of Reenconnell hill on its northern and southern sides and overlooking Smerwick Harbour to the west.

The stone stands on the north side of the path that leads through the graveyard to the church, and it is visible and accessible to anyone who walks that route. The hourglass perforation is worth looking at closely once you reach it: at twelve centimetres deep and just seven centimetres across at its widest, it is a surprisingly precise feature in what is otherwise a simply dressed stone.