It began its known life on Church Island in County Kerry, where it was found not in its original upright position but already displaced, lying in the south-western part of the island, before formal excavation even began in the 1940s. Fractured at its base and measuring just under one and a half metres in length, the stone is remarkable less for its size than for what was done to it, and then done to it again.

The earlier intervention, dated by the excavator to somewhere between 650 and 750 AD, produced an unusually precise decorative cross. It was drawn with a compass, a detail that rewards attention: the design consists of a central circle surrounded by four smaller circles, each connected to an enclosing outline circle by four petals with clipped, truncated tips, with a broad shaft hanging below the whole arrangement. The effect is geometric and deliberate, quite different from the freehand early medieval carving one might expect. The ogham inscription, by contrast, came later. Ogham is an early Irish script in which letters are formed by groups of notches and scores cut along the edge or face of a stone, and here those marks were added after the cross design was already in place. The reading proposed by Kavanagh, one of the original excavators, is BECCDINN MACI RI[T(T)A]VVECASS, a personal name followed by a patronymic formula meaning roughly "son of" someone whose name remains partially uncertain. Part of the third word is conjectural: a faint score on the stone's side may represent an effort to squeeze in letters where space was tight, and two notches of one letter were cut directly over an existing symbol in the cross design, as though the person carving the inscription was working around, or simply through, what was already there.

The stone has since been studied as part of the Ogham in 3D project, run by the School of Celtic Studies at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, which uses digital scanning to capture the fine surface detail of ogham stones across Ireland, including ambiguous or damaged inscriptions of exactly the kind this slab presents.