That small act of either homage or mischief sits on the same face as an inscription probably more than a thousand years older, and it captures something of the complicated afterlife these stones tend to have.

Ogham is an early Irish script, typically carved as a series of notches and lines along the edge or face of a stone, most often recording a personal name in a formula meaning roughly "X, son of Y". This stone, about 1.3 metres tall and found on the eastern side of a townland boundary fence between Ballyrobert and Rathcobane, carries a weathered inscription read by the scholar R.A.S. Macalister in 1945 as LOGA MAQI SDANBI. The stone's position in the field did not quite match the location shown on Ordnance Survey maps from 1901 and 1936, suggesting it had already shifted before any modern record was made. In 1885 it was lifted entirely from its socket, and the antiquarian Barry noted in 1886 that the disturbance turned up two or three small fragments of what he called "crockery" at its base, each only a few inches square. Whether those sherds were incidental or connected to some original act of deposition around the stone, nobody recorded. Following a survey visit in 1986, the stone was moved again, this time deliberately, to the grounds of Scoil an Easpaig O Briain in the nearby village of Bartlemy, where it has remained since.