That quiet act of private acquisition, sometime around 1984, is what makes this stone's situation so curious: an ogham stone, one of Ireland's earliest written monuments, relocated by commerce and personal initiative rather than by the slow drift of centuries.

Ogham is an early medieval script in which letters are represented by groups of notches and lines cut along the edge of a stone, most often recording a personal name in a formulaic genealogical phrase. The inscription on this stone, as read by the scholar R.A.S. Macalister and included in his 1945 corpus of ogham inscriptions as number 248, runs only partially: '. . . QET[IA?]S M[A?]Q TRENIL[U? . . .]', the brackets indicating uncertain or missing letters. The formula 'MAQQ' or 'MAQ', meaning 'son of', is the standard construction found on hundreds of such stones across Ireland and western Britain, so the surviving fragment likely preserves part of a name and a patronymic, though both remain incomplete. The stone now measures 0.67 metres long by 0.33 metres wide and 0.31 metres deep, but an earlier account published by Lynch in 1908 noted that it was once considerably larger and had been broken at the base, meaning the full inscription is almost certainly lost. Its original findspot was in or near a circular enclosure in the neighbouring townland of Bawnaglanna, near Castleisland, and it was from that location, or somewhere close to it, that it was eventually sold and moved to its present resting place on the ringfort bank in Toornanoulagh.