What survives on this modest rectangular stone, measuring 1.1 metres in height and roughly 0.3 metres on each side, is not the inscription its carvers intended but a secondary one, scratched informally along what scholars call the dexter angle, the right-hand edge. The epigrapher R.A.S. Macalister, writing in 1945, dismissed it as "a mere graffito, roughly scratched," reading it as DILOGONN, a reading later confirmed by Damian McManus in 1991. Whatever the original ogham inscription said, it is gone.

The stone began its recorded life in 1846, when it was found built into a souterrain at Ballyhank, County Cork. A souterrain is an underground stone-lined passage, typically associated with early medieval ringforts and used for storage or refuge. This particular souterrain sat in the south-western quadrant of a ringfort, and it yielded not one but six ogham stones, all apparently repurposed as structural material long after their inscriptions were first carved. Ogham itself is an early medieval script, used primarily in Ireland between roughly the fourth and seventh centuries, in which letters are represented by groups of notches and lines cut along the edge of a stone. The Ballyhank stones are recorded together in the archaeological inventory of County Cork compiled by Power and colleagues in 1997, and this stone carries the reference number CIIC 102 in Macalister's Corpus Inscriptionum Insularum Celticarum.

The stone is now held in Dublin and has been examined as part of the Ogham in 3D project, an initiative of the School of Celtic Studies at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies that uses digital scanning to record surviving ogham inscriptions in fine detail. The project's publicly accessible database, at ogham.celt.dias.ie, includes a full entry for this stone where visitors can explore the surface geometry and what little lettering remains. For anyone wanting to engage with the physical object, it is worth contacting the holding institution in advance to confirm access and current display arrangements.