That is the kind of fate that can befall an ogham stone, and it says something about how thoroughly these monuments were absorbed into the working landscape long before anyone thought to protect them. Ogham is an early medieval script, used mainly in Ireland between roughly the fourth and seventh centuries, in which letters are represented by a series of notches and strokes cut along the edge of a standing stone. The stones were often tall, prominent features in the countryside, and that visibility made them convenient raw material for later generations.

This particular stone was a very tall one, removed at some point from the north-western quadrant of a ringfort known as Lisagallaun. A ringfort is a circular enclosure, typically defined by an earthen bank and ditch, used as a farmstead during the early medieval period. Once the stone was taken from Lisagallaun, it was broken into several pieces: one became a workbench in a nearby farmyard, another was set up as a gatepost to a haggard, the enclosed yard beside a farmhouse where hay and corn were stacked. The scholar R. A. S. Macalister examined the gatepost fragment and recorded its dimensions as 1.8 metres long by 0.75 metres wide and 0.25 metres thick. Along the dexter edge, the right-hand edge when the inscription faces the reader, he found traces of a very worn inscription. He noted that only after prolonged study could he extract a reading, which he rendered as SECIDARI. Whether that represents a personal name, part of one, or something else is uncertain; ogham inscriptions on fragmentary and heavily worn stones are rarely straightforward. By the time Power and colleagues documented the stone in 1997, even the gatepost had been broken up and the pieces scattered, leaving nothing coherent to examine.