It is an ogham stone, one of those upright slabs incised with the earliest form of written Irish, a script made up of notches and strokes cut along a central stemline. This particular example, modest in size at roughly three quarters of a metre tall, travelled from its original setting before ending up in the city, making it a migrant artefact as much as an ancient one.

The stone was originally found in 1902 by Lord Walter Fitzgerald, who located it in the north-east sector of Donaghmore graveyard in County Kildare, where, according to O'Hanluain writing in the 1930s and 40s, it had been serving as a marker for an O'Farrell family grave. That secondary use is common enough; ogham stones were frequently repurposed in medieval and early modern Ireland, embedded into church walls or planted as grave markers long after the tradition of cutting them had ended. The epigrapher R.A.S. Macalister recorded the inscription in 1945 as NETTAVRECC [KOI] MAQI MUCCOI TRENALUGGO, a formula typical of early Irish ogham stones, which often record a personal name followed by a patronymic and tribal identifier. Macalister's reading was not the last word, however. The scholar Damian McManus, writing in 1997, pointed out that the spacing on the stone allowed for a more plausible reading of the first name as NETTAVROICC or NETTAVROECC, and cast doubt on the middle element KOI, suggesting Macalister may have filled a gap with something uncertain.

Because the notes record this as the present location rather than a named institution, anyone hoping to see the stone should verify its current whereabouts before visiting, as objects of this kind are sometimes held in museum storage rather than on permanent public display. If it is accessible, it is worth taking time to look closely at the stemline edge where the ogham strokes are cut, since the inscription, even if partially ambiguous, preserves a personal name from somewhere around the fifth or sixth century. The disagreement between Macalister and McManus is itself part of the object's interest; a stone this size, measuring 0.76 by 0.36 by 0.23 metres, holds a surprising amount of scholarly argument.