The stone is only half a metre above ground, roughly rectangular and oriented on a north-east to south-west axis, and along its south-western arris, the edge or corner ridge of the stone, a series of ogham characters is cut. Ogham is an early medieval Irish script in which letters are represented by groups of notches and strokes running along a central line, most often the edge of a standing stone. Here, those characters spell out something close to "CIRE" or "CUORE", but the sequence trails off in both directions: the top of the stone has been broken away, and the inscription continues downward into the earth below the current ground surface. Whatever name or phrase was once recorded here is, for now, incomplete.

The stone sits in the north-western corner of a cillin, a children's burial ground, a category of site found across Ireland where unbaptised infants and others excluded from consecrated ground were interred, often in marginal or ancient locations. This particular cillin at Gowlane appears to lie within a possible ecclesiastical enclosure, suggesting the site had an earlier religious significance before it became a place of informal burial. Scattered stones on the ground around the ogham stone hint that other structural remains may once have stood nearby. Documented by Dennehy in 2001, the stone represents a fragment of an older commemorative or devotional tradition layered beneath centuries of quieter, sadder use.