The fact that it needed a new home at all tells you something about how thoroughly this landscape has been rearranged over the centuries.

The stone came to light in 1844 when a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage typically associated with early medieval ringforts, was opened inside a ringfort beside Ballynatrasna House at Glenawillin. Ogham is an early medieval Irish script in which letters are represented by groups of notches and lines cut along the edge of a stone, and this example carries its inscription along the dexter angle of its south-east face, though wear has made it difficult to pin down. R. A. S. Macalister, reading the stone in 1945, transcribed the inscription as LODIMONI, working downwards. M. J. O'Kelly, working independently the same year, read the same marks as LADIMANI. Both are plausible personal names of the kind commonly commemorated on such stones, but the disagreement has never been resolved. When the stone was moved from its original find spot, it was set up within the same townland on the site of what a contemporary source, writing in 1883 to 1884, described as "another erased rath", a ringfort that had already been obliterated from the ground surface. A second ogham stone was found in the same souterrain; that one is now on permanent display in the Stone Corridor at University College Cork, where it can be examined alongside other inscribed stones from the region.