The stone in question was not excavated by archaeologists or lifted carefully from a known site; it was turned up during peat cutting at Carrigagulla in County Cork, its precise original location now lost. That kind of displacement is not unusual for ogham stones, the upright pillars carved with the ogham script, an alphabet of notches and lines cut along the stone's edge that was used primarily in Ireland between roughly the fourth and seventh centuries AD to record personal names, often in a formulaic genealogical pattern.

This particular stone measures 1.6 metres long by 0.23 metres square in cross-section, making it a fairly typical example of the form. Its inscription, as read by the scholar R.A.S. Macalister in 1945, runs DOVETI MAQI LOCARENAS CELI MAQI-CULIDOVI, a phrase following the standard ogham convention of identifying a person by their father's name using the word MAQI, meaning "son of". So the stone commemorates, roughly, Dovetius son of Locarena, with a second genealogical phrase attached. Later scholarship introduced some uncertainty: Damian McManus, working in 1991 and again in 2004, found the fourth word, CELI, and most of the first MAQI difficult or impossible to read with confidence. That kind of scholarly disagreement is common with ogham, where weathering and differing interpretive methods can produce genuinely divergent readings of the same stone.

The stone is on permanent display in the Stone Corridor at University College Cork, which holds one of the more accessible collections of ogham stones in the country. The corridor itself runs along the interior of the university's main quadrangle building, and the stones can be viewed during normal opening hours without any specialist access.