The workmen found them inconvenient. They borrowed a sledge-hammer and smashed both stones to pieces. That act of pragmatic destruction very nearly erased a pair of ogham inscriptions, among the oldest form of writing in Ireland, in which letters are encoded as groups of notches and lines cut along the edge or face of a stone.

J. G. A. Prim, writing in the 1850s, recovered the fragments and set about reconstructing what he could. The first stone, a purplish-grey sandstone, had originally measured roughly five and a half feet in length, tapering from about two feet wide in the middle down to less than a foot at either end. It had broken into six pieces, but the inscription ran along the edge of only three of them, and Prim judged it unnecessary to preserve the rest. Reassembled and placed in the Society's Museum, the surviving portion retained its full inscribed length. Prim noted one further curiosity: if the stone had originally stood upright in the ground, part of the inscription would necessarily have been buried beneath the surface, suggesting the ogham was carved before the stone was set in place, or that reading it in full was never quite the point. The scholar R. A. S. Macalister, working from the fragments in the twentieth century, and Damian McManus after him, read the inscription as BRAN[I]TTAS M[A]QI DUCR[I]DDA, a formula typical of early medieval ogham stones, giving a personal name followed by the word for "son of" and a father's name. The fragments are now held in the National Museum of Ireland. The ringfort itself, the one Prim later marked on a map with the annotation "the rath in which the Oghams were found", is long gone.