The script is ogham, an early medieval writing system in which letters are encoded as notches and strokes cut along the edge of a stone, and what it records is a genealogical formula of the kind common to early Irish memorial practice: the name of a man, his father, and his grandfather. The stone is far from where it began its life, and the full text may no longer be legible, but it remains an unusually well-travelled piece of early Irish epigraphy.

The stone is believed to have been recovered from the bed of a stream in the townland of Ballyeightragh on the Dingle Peninsula, though its precise original context is unknown. In 1919 it was presented to the Bishop of Kerry and subsequently moved to St. Brendan's Seminary in Killarney, before being relocated a short distance to its present position. The inscription runs along the south-west corner of the stone, continuing around the apex and down the north-east corner, beginning roughly 34 centimetres above the current ground level. When the scholar R. A. S. Macalister read it in 1945, he transcribed it as MAQI-LIAG MAQI ERCA, meaning "son of Liag, son of Erca". By the time Judith Cuppage examined it for her 1986 survey of the Dingle Peninsula, the final letter A was no longer legible and the first I had been damaged at a point where a notch had been cut into the stone's edge. Whether that notch, along with possible sharpening marks on the north-west and south-east faces, was made in antiquity or at some later point is not recorded.

The stone sits quietly in an ecclesiastical setting that gives no particular account of its age or origins. Visitors who know what to look for will find the scored strokes along the arris, the edge of the stone, where each group of marks corresponds to a letter in the ogham alphabet. The inscription wraps around the apex, which is itself a notable detail, since the text was clearly composed to be read as a continuous circuit rather than in a single plane.