Ogham is an early medieval script, typically carved along the edge or angle of a stone, in which a series of notches and strokes represent letters. This particular stone, roughly 1.1 metres tall, carries an inscription on two of its opposed angles reading CCICAMINI MAQQI C(A)TTINI, a formula characteristic of memorial stones from early Christian Ireland, though two of the vowels are no longer legible. It is one of seven such stones that were removed from their original context and scattered across County Kerry by the ambitions of a single nineteenth-century landowner.

The story begins with a storm. Sometime towards the end of the eighteenth century, a violent storm at Ballinrannig on the Dingle Peninsula exposed a remarkable cluster of material at a site known as Cillvickillane, or Cill Mhic Uíleáin. Seven ogham stones came to light, along with a possible fragment of an eighth, a cross-inscribed stone, several graves, quantities of bone, and the ruins of a number of houses. The antiquarian John Windele visited and sketched the scene in 1838, recording the ogham stones arranged in a rough semi-circle on top of a mound, with a slab-lined grave set nearby. It was an extraordinary assemblage, almost certainly the remains of an early ecclesiastical site. Lord Ventry, however, saw the stones differently. In the mid-nineteenth century he removed six of them from the site entirely. Four were repurposed as edging for the driveway at Burnham House, later Coláiste Íde, between Dingle and Ventry. Two more, including the Tullygarran stone, were relocated to the grounds of Chute Hall. Only the seventh stone was left at Ballinrannig, where it still stands. The inscription on this stone was recorded by R. A. S. Macalister in 1945, and the scores, aside from those two missing vowels, remain clearly defined.