The stone, a slab of sandstone grit just over two metres tall, carries an ogham inscription, that is, text rendered in the early medieval Irish script that runs notches and scores along the edges of a stone rather than across a flat face. What makes this particular stone quietly melancholy is how much has already been lost. When the scholar R. A. S. Macalister published his reading in 1945, he could make out the formula ANM LLATIGNI MAQ M[I]N[E]RC M[UCOI] Q[...]CI, a personal name, a father's name, and a tribal or kin group designation, the standard biography carved onto hundreds of such stones across early Christian Ireland. By the time later researchers examined it, entire sections of that reading had vanished from the surface entirely.

The stone had not always stood upright in this location. Before the Office of Public Works re-erected it in the 1940s, it had been lying partly buried on Darrynane strand, exposed to the sea air and whatever foot traffic a beach brings. The move preserved it physically, but erosion had clearly been at work for a long time before that. Macalister recorded a double L near the beginning of the inscription; only three of those scores remain visible now. The first I and G that followed are poorly preserved. The N and I after those have gone entirely. On the dexter angle, the lower-right edge of the stone as it faces you, none of the inscription Macalister recorded is any longer apparent at all. What survives is a partial name, a few terminal marks where scores once ran, and the outline of a formula that was once a statement of identity. The Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies has included the stone in its Ogham in 3D project, using digital scanning techniques to recover detail that the naked eye can no longer find, which offers at least the possibility that some of what seems lost is only invisible rather than gone.