The ogham alphabet, used in Ireland from roughly the fourth to the seventh centuries AD, works by cutting notches and lines along the edge or face of a stone, typically to record a personal name in a formulaic phrase meaning something like "X, son of Y". This particular stone, now located in Donard, County Wicklow, has spent much of its recorded life somewhere other than where it currently stands.

The stone's earliest documented home was on a farm called Old Mills, south of the village of Donard, where it stood close to a second, uninscribed stone. When the scholar R.A.S. Macalister examined the inscription in 1897, he found it much worn and damaged, managing to read only a partial sequence: IAQINI KOI MAQI MUC, with the text becoming illegible after the inscription turned onto the top face of the stone. The formula MAQI, meaning "son of", is a standard feature of ogham inscriptions, suggesting this was a memorial or territorial marker of some kind, though the names involved cannot be fully recovered. The stone was subsequently moved to an interim location north of Donard, notable enough to be marked on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, before being relocated again to its present position in 1995. It measures 1.52 metres tall, 0.68 metres wide, and 0.53 metres deep, and has been subject to a preservation order since 1940. More recently it was included in the "Ogham in 3D" project run by the School of Celtic Studies at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, which uses digital scanning to record inscriptions that centuries of weathering have made increasingly difficult to read with the naked eye.