But this particular stone carries an ogham inscription, one of those early medieval texts incised in a script of notched and scored lines running along a stone's edge, used in Ireland roughly between the fourth and seventh centuries to record names and lineages in an archaic form of Irish. What makes this example especially interesting is not just its inscription but the long-running scholarly disagreement about what that inscription actually says.

The stone was first recorded in 1939 by R. A. S. Macalister, the prolific cataloguer of Irish ogham monuments, who published his findings in his 1945 corpus. He described the stone as measuring approximately 1.17 by 0.71 by 0.38 metres, noted a small Latin cross pattee, a cross with arms that flare outward at the tips, carved on its side, and read the inscription as ANM MAGANN MAQI NUADAT. The formula is a familiar one: ANM is a devotional or memorial marker, MAQI means "son of", giving something like "In the name of Magann, son of Nuadat." Macalister also noted that the top of the stone appeared to be cut off, though he believed this had not damaged the lettering. There is a further complication in that Macalister attributed the stone to the townland of Curraghmore West rather than East, a small discrepancy that has caused confusion in the record ever since. Damian McManus, writing in 1997, challenged Macalister's reading of the final name, arguing that it was highly unlikely a particular symbol could be read as an otherwise unattested epigraphical character carrying the diphthong value "ua". McManus was also uncertain whether the consonant near the end of the inscription was a D or a T, and whether additional vowel scores on the broken top angle had been lost. His own reading leaves that portion of the text unresolved: ANM MAGANN MAQI N?Dad/t, with the question mark indicating genuine ambiguity rather than scholarly caution for its own sake.

The stone's condition, its severed top and its recumbent position in a field, means that some of what it once said may simply be gone. The disagreement between Macalister and McManus is not unusual for ogham scholarship; the script's very nature, a series of strokes and notches on a weathered edge, makes readings provisional in a way that neatly cut Roman letters rarely are. A three-dimensional digital model of the stone is available online, which allows the inscription to be examined in some detail without the need to locate a field in a townland whose precise identification remains, itself, a matter of some uncertainty.