It is an ogham stone, one of hundreds that survive across the island, bearing a form of writing that uses a series of notches and lines cut along a central stem edge to represent letters. This particular stone measures roughly 1.37 metres in length and has been read by scholars as bearing the inscription ERCAGNI MA[QI] E[R]CIAS, a formula typical of early ogham monuments: essentially a statement of identity, naming a person and their parentage. The QI element here is a form of the word for "son", making this a record of someone called Ercagnas, son of Ercias.

What makes its presence in a Cork university corridor quietly arresting is that the stone does not belong to Cork at all. It was removed from a leacht at Seemochudha in County Waterford. A leacht is a type of commemorative cairn or mounded structure associated with early Christian saints and burial practices, and the removal of an ogham stone from such a context means that whatever ritual or memorial landscape it once anchored is now incomplete. The stone was catalogued by R. A. S. Macalister in 1945, and its inscription was subsequently examined by Damian McManus in 2004, both scholars working through the difficult task of reading characters that may be worn, ambiguous, or partially lost, hence the bracketed letters in the transcription.