The object in question is an ogham stone, one of Ireland's early medieval standing stones incised with the ogham alphabet, a writing system that uses a series of notches and strokes along a central stem line to represent letters. This particular example was hewn from Kerry rock and travelled a considerable distance from its original context, and the question of exactly what it says has not been fully resolved in the century and more since it was first examined.

The stone was found in 1877 inside what was described as a 'rath cave', an underground passage or souterrain associated with a ringfort, near Killorglin in County Kerry. Souterrains were stone-lined underground chambers used for storage or refuge during the early medieval period, and ogham stones were sometimes reused as building material within them. The scholar John Rhys recorded the discovery in 1902, placing it near Killorglin, while the influential epigrapher R. A. S. Macalister later provenanced it more specifically to near Lough Carragh. The stone stands 1.2 metres high with a base measuring roughly 0.45 by 0.42 metres. Macalister, in his 1945 corpus of ogham inscriptions, read the text as GALEOTOS, a personal name in the genitive case, as is typical of ogham commemorative formulae. He also noticed three additional vowel notches near the top of the stone and interpreted these as the remnant of an earlier, separate inscription that had been partially lost. Fionnbarr Moore has suggested an alternative reading: that these notches may instead be the continuation of the existing inscription rather than a trace of something earlier.

The stone has since been recorded as part of the 'Ogham in 3D' project run by the School of Celtic Studies at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, which uses photogrammetry and three-dimensional scanning to document ogham inscriptions in detail. The project's entry for this stone, catalogued as CIIC 253, is accessible through their online database at ogham.celt.dias.ie. Given that the notes describe this as the stone's present location rather than a publicly accessible monument, it is worth checking the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies or the relevant heritage records before making a visit, as the stone may be held in an institutional or private setting rather than on open display.