This is an ogham stone, one of Ireland's most distinctive early medieval monuments. Ogham is a script used roughly between the fourth and seventh centuries, in which letters are represented by sets of notches and lines cut along the edge of a stone, most often recording a personal name in a commemorative or territorial formula. What makes the Gour stone quietly melancholy is that even that minimal message has been lost.

The scholar R. A. S. Macalister examined the stone and published his findings in 1945, cataloguing it as number 67 in his corpus. He described what he saw as a damaged inscription in minute scores, and interpreted the surviving characters as spelling CARI, most likely a fragment of a personal name in the genitive case, meaning something like "of Carus" or "of Cara". A later survey, Power et al. from 1992, confirmed the stone's dimensions and orientation, its long axis running roughly north-north-west to south-south-east, but by that point the inscription was no longer legible at all. What Macalister managed to decipher with difficulty in the mid-twentieth century had, by the early 1990s, faded beyond recovery. The stone itself remains, a rectangle of considerable size, but the name it once held has effectively gone.