Yet even in its broken state, it carries the remnants of an ogham inscription, the early medieval Irish script in which letters are represented by a series of notches and strokes cut along the edge of a stone. This particular piece is broken at both ends, meaning the full name or dedication it once bore is now permanently incomplete, with only the partial reading TA)Q MAQ(I surviving.

The stone's path to the museum is a small puzzle in itself. It was acquired by University College Cork in 1940, purchased from a Mr Garret Fitzgerald, who gave its origin as Parkalassa Fort in the townland of Annagap. The problem is that no ringfort by that name is known to have existed there. What researchers have since pieced together is that the northern half of a ringfort called Lisnakilla was owned by Fitzgerald, and the current landowner of that land has confirmed this as the stone's actual point of origin. A ringfort, for context, is a roughly circular enclosure defined by an earthen bank, widely built across Ireland during the early medieval period, and ogham stones are frequently associated with such sites, sometimes as grave markers or boundary indicators. The scholar R.A.S. Macalister had noted by 1945 that the section of stone bearing the inscription's first two letters was already missing, meaning the loss predates living memory and leaves the text without a recoverable beginning or end.