That a carved early medieval monument was found half-swallowed by a beach is unusual enough, but what makes the stone stranger still is how little of its original message now survives. Ogham is an early Irish script in which letters are represented by groups of notches or scores cut along the edge of a stone, typically reading upward along one angle and downward along the other. What was once a legible inscription has eroded to near-silence.

The stone, made of sandstone grit, stands 2.1 metres high and measures roughly half a metre by just over a third of a metre at its base. The scholar R. A. S. Macalister, working in 1945, read the inscription as ANM LLATIGNI MAQ M[I]N[E]RC M[UCOI] Q[...]CI, a formula typical of early Irish commemorative stones: roughly, "the name of Llatigni, son of Minerc, of the tribe of..." with the final element now unrecoverable. But even Macalister's reading, reconstructed with some effort, has since become more doubtful. Later examination found only three scores of his proposed double L where more should appear, and letters he recorded on the dexter angle of the stone, where the inscription was meant to continue downward, are now entirely invisible. The I, N, and E of the third word cannot be made out; only the terminals of the scores for R survive. The stone has been the subject of the "Ogham in 3D" project run by the School of Celtic Studies at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, which uses digital scanning to recover traces that the eye can no longer follow.