It began its known modern history in 1838, when the demolition of an eighteenth-century Church of Ireland parish church at Aghabulloge graveyard brought it to light. Ogham is an early medieval Irish script in which letters are formed by combinations of notches and strokes cut along the edge of a stone, typically used to record personal names, and this stone once carried such an inscription. The problem is that damage to the stone has made that inscription almost impossible to read with any confidence.

The scholar R.A.S. Macalister, working in 1945, attempted a reading and proposed the text ANM NETACUNAS CELI VIDETTAS. Damian McManus, however, writing in 1991 and again in 2004, described the first two words of that reconstruction as rash. An earlier scholar, Power, writing in 1932, went further and concluded that speculating about the original inscription was simply useless. The stone is one of two ogham stones recovered from the Aghabulloge site; the second remains where it was found, in situ at the graveyard. This one was moved to Cork City, and its present location places it at some remove from its original context, a common fate for stones unearthed during construction or demolition works in the nineteenth century. What survives is a damaged fragment whose inscription has generated more scholarly disagreement than certainty, a situation that is itself fairly common in ogham studies, where stones have spent centuries exposed to weathering and occasional rough handling before anyone thought to record them carefully.