This particular slate slab, one of that group, ended up broken at its upper end at some point in its history, yet the inscription it carries survived well enough to keep scholars arguing for decades. Ogham is an early Irish script in which letters are encoded as notches and scores cut along the edge of a stone, and here the characters were chiselled along the dexter edge and across the top of the slab.

The disagreement centred on a single stretch of the inscription. R. A. S. Macalister, whose monumental 1945 corpus of ogham stones remains a foundational reference, read the text as LAMADILICCI MAC MAIC BROCC, a formula recording a person's name followed by a patronymic lineage reaching back two generations. Damian McManus, working in 2004, could only be confident of a partial reading and doubted the MAC MAIC section in particular. That uncertainty was overtaken by events: conservation work carried out on the whole Ballyknock collection in 2009 clarified the stone's surface, and a fresh inspection in 2016 came down in favour of Macalister's original reading, MAC MAIC included. The stone is now held on permanent display in the Stone Corridor at University College Cork, where it sits alongside others from the same souterrain hoard, a reminder that early medieval communities sometimes deposited or reused these inscribed markers in ways that still resist easy explanation.