It is one of four ogham stones lining that approach, each one displaced from its original resting place and repurposed, in a sense, as ornamental roadside markers. Ogham is an early medieval script in which letters are represented by notches and scores cut along the edge of a stone, typically recording a personal name and parentage. This particular stone, just over a metre tall and relatively slender, holds a partial inscription that scholars have been arguing over for well over a century.

The stone was originally part of a remarkable cluster at a site in Ballinrannig townland known as Cillvickillane, or Cill Mhic Uíleáin. A storm at the end of the eighteenth century stripped away enough ground there to expose seven ogham stones, a possible fragment of an eighth, a cross-inscribed stone, several slab-lined graves, quantities of bone, and the ruins of a number of houses. John Windele, who visited and sketched the site in 1838, recorded the ogham stones arranged in a rough semi-circle on top of the mound, with a grave nearby. In the mid-nineteenth century, Lord Ventry removed six of the seven stones; four came to Burnham House, which later became Coláiste Íde, while two others ended up at Chute Hall near Tralee. The seventh was left in place at Ballinrannig. The inscription on this stone, the third of the Burnham group, survives only in fragments: the readable portion runs something like NAVICAS MAQI MUCO(I), a typical early Irish formula giving a name followed by a lineage, but the letters before the N are so faint that Windele and O'Kelly read them as OD while Macalister, writing in 1945, preferred GR. The final word is reduced to a single letter. Macalister proposed the name DOVVINIAS to complete it, but that reading appears nowhere in earlier accounts and may simply have been a guess on his part, however educated.