The westerly of two upright stones flanking the gateway once carried an ogham inscription, ogham being the early medieval script in which letters are represented by groups of notches or strokes cut along the edge or face of a stone. By the time scholars began examining it in earnest, the text was already fading, and the story of this particular stone is largely one of progressive, irreversible loss.

The earliest recorded description comes from R. R. Brash in 1879, who noted only a few worn vowel scores on the upper part of an angle, already too degraded to read with confidence. When the prolific epigrapher R. A. S. Macalister examined it in 1907, he was still able to propose a reading: LUGUDECA MAQI SI[TT?]ALI MUCOI M, a formula typical of early ogham stones, in which a personal name is followed by MAQI, meaning "son of", and MUCOI, indicating a tribal or kin grouping. But Macalister himself later conceded that "this once fine inscription is, I fear, now beyond hope." P. J. Hartnett, visiting in 1939, could find nothing that he was willing to call ogham scores at all. The inscription, whatever it once said, has effectively vanished. The stone itself remains, about 1.8 metres tall, one of a matched pair set on a southeast to northwest axis at the entrance to what may have been an early ecclesiastical enclosure. Two further stones in the vicinity have also been identified as possible ogham examples, suggesting the site was once a place of some significance, though the full picture is now difficult to recover.