Ogham is an early medieval Irish script in which letters are represented by sets of notches and strokes cut along the edge or face of a stone, most commonly used to record personal names and lineages. This particular stone, along with a companion, was broken apart deliberately during land clearance works, rescued in pieces, and eventually deposited in the National Museum of Ireland, far removed from the Kilkenny fields where it had stood for well over a thousand years.

The scholar R. A. S. Macalister, writing in 1945, pieced together the circumstances of the stones' discovery. According to his account, a farmer clearing a group of ringforts, the circular earthwork enclosures associated with early medieval Irish settlement, from his land at Dunbell Big in County Kilkenny turned up the two ogham stones in the course of that work. Finding them an obstacle rather than an object of interest, he broke them up. The fragments were subsequently recovered and preserved. The stone now in Dublin measured six feet in length by approximately one foot wide, with the inscription cut along one of its angles. Macalister read the surviving text as NAVALLO AVVI GENITTAC, followed by a section now lost, a formula typical of ogham inscriptions that would originally have named an individual and their ancestry.

The stone is catalogued under its present Dublin location, though its origins remain firmly in County Kilkenny, and any visit to see it means a trip to the National Museum of Ireland rather than a rural field. The museum's collections are housed primarily at Kildare Street in Dublin city centre, and while not every piece in the collection is on permanent public display, the ogham stones from Dunbell Big are documented in the archaeological record under reference numbers KK024-01003 and KK024-01004. Anyone with a particular interest in ogham would do well to check in advance what is accessible on the gallery floor, and to look out for the characteristic narrow profile and angled inscription that makes this class of monument so quietly distinctive up close.