Ogham is a writing system in which letters are represented by sets of notches and lines cut along the edge of a stone, and it was used primarily in Ireland between roughly the fourth and seventh centuries to record, in archaic Irish or occasionally Latin, the names and genealogies of individuals. When a ploughman turned up this particular stone in 1872, a local farmer reported that it had previously served as a lintel stone in what may have been a long cist grave, a type of early burial in which the body is laid within a box formed from flat slabs. By the time scholars got to it, the stone had accumulated, as the epigrapher R.A.S. Macalister later put it, a series of vicissitudes, all of which had left scars upon its surface.

Despite the damage, Macalister published a reading of the inscription in 1945, rendering it as VEQREQ MUCOI GLUNLEGGET. The formula MUCOI, meaning "of the tribe of" or "descendant of", is a characteristic feature of ogham genealogical inscriptions and gives some sense of the commemorative purpose these stones served. The stone was recorded by Richard Rolt Brash in 1879, and subsequently purchased by the Royal Irish Academy before passing into the collection of the National Museum of Ireland, where it remains. More recently it was among the stones examined as part of the Ogham in 3D project run by the School of Celtic Studies at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, which uses photogrammetry and digital imaging to document inscriptions whose physical condition makes them difficult to read by eye alone.