At the entrance to Killeen Cormac burial ground near Colbinstown in County Kildare stands a stone whose message has been partly swallowed by time. Ogham, the earliest form of writing in Ireland, encodes language as a series of notches and strokes carved along the edge of a stone, and this particular example has its inscription running along its north-east corner. The trouble is that the beginning and the end are gone. What remains, according to R.A.S. Macalister's 1945 reading, is something like ...EGNI KOI MAQI MUC[..] A[.]I.., a fragment that trails off at both ends. A fracture on the corner took with it the letters OI from what was probably the word MUCOI, a formula meaning "of the tribe of" that appears on many early medieval commemorative stones across Ireland.

The stone was not always visible. It was found buried and later re-erected just inside the modern entrance to the burial ground, where it now sits earthfast, roughly rectangular, and covered in lichen, measuring about 1.2 metres high, 0.5 metres wide east to west, and 0.3 metres thick. The north and south faces are uneven, while the east and west ends are comparatively smooth. Killeen Cormac is an unusually rich site in this respect: seven ogham stones in total were recorded here by Macalister, which is a remarkable concentration for a single burial ground. The inscription on this stone has since been taken up by the Ogham in 3D project run by the School of Celtic Studies at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, which rendered it in three-dimensional imagery and offered a translation of the surviving text as roughly "here, son of the tribe of," the names at either end lost to the broken stone.

The stone sits just inside the burial ground entrance, so it is visible without needing to go far into the site. The lichen cover means the inscription is not easy to read with the naked eye, and the surviving text is in any case fragmentary; knowing in advance that it runs along the north-east corner edge, rather than across a flat face, helps orient the eye. The other six ogham stones recorded at Killeen Cormac make the site worth approaching as a group rather than for any single example.