What makes it quietly remarkable is how little of it remains legible: when the scholar R.A.S. Macalister examined it in 1945, he could identify only the end of the letter M and a few further marks he described as "not so certainly intended as letters." It is, in other words, a fragment of a fragment, the kind of object that raises more questions than it answers.

The stone was originally recovered from Rathcanning fort, a ringfort sitting on the crown of a hill in Glenaphuca townland with open views in every direction. Macalister rescued it from the wall of the fort itself, where it had been reused as ordinary building material, its carved ogham script, an early medieval Irish writing system using notched lines along a central stem, reduced to a convenient bit of rubble. A second ogham stone, catalogued separately, was long assumed to have come from a souterrain within the same fort, a souterrain being an underground stone-lined passage associated with early medieval settlement. However, the earliest written account of that second stone places its origin at a different souterrain to the south of Rathcanning, closer to where it was found reused in a farmyard, a detail noted by Power and colleagues in 1994. The two stones, in other words, may have no common origin beyond the accident of both being carved, then lost, then found again.

The fragment has since been documented as part of the "Ogham in 3D" project run by the School of Celtic Studies at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, which has produced detailed digital records of ogham stones across Ireland. Full details for this stone, catalogued as CIIC no. 80, can be accessed through the project's online database at ogham.celt.dias.ie. The stone's current Dublin location means it is more accessible than most comparable objects, though visitors interested in the original hillfort setting at Glenaphuca will find that the landscape context, and whatever remains of the fort itself, tells a rather different story to the fragment now held in the city.