The journey it has made, both physical and scholarly, says something about how Ireland's early medieval past tends to surface in accidental and undignified ways.

The stone originally comes from Monataggart in County Cork, where it was turned up by a plough in 1872. According to the farmer who found it, it had been lying as a lintel over what appeared to be a long cist grave, a type of stone-lined burial common in early medieval Ireland. It was subsequently set up as a gate post, a fate shared by a surprising number of ogham stones across the country. Ogham is an early Irish writing system in which letters are represented by groups of notches and lines cut along the edge of a stone, most examples dating from roughly the fourth to the seventh centuries. The inscription on this stone was recorded by the scholar R.A.S. Macalister in 1945 as reading VEQREQ MUCOI GLUNLEGGET, a formula typical of commemorative ogham inscriptions, though Macalister noted that the stone had endured considerable damage over the centuries, leaving what he described as scars from a series of vicissitudes. The stone is substantial, measuring 2.5 metres in length and roughly 0.4 by 0.3 metres in cross-section, and was first noted in published form by Richard Rolt Brash in 1879.

The stone has since been recorded as part of the Ogham in 3D project, an initiative run by the School of Celtic Studies at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, which uses digital scanning to capture inscriptions in precise detail. That project has made high-resolution data on this stone publicly accessible online. Visitors wanting to examine the inscription closely would do well to consult the Ogham in 3D database before or after any encounter with the stone itself, given that the surface damage Macalister described makes reading the carved notches in person a matter of some patience.