It is a small, specific frustration that says a great deal about how ancient things survive, and at what cost.

Ogham is an early medieval script, most often carved along the edges or faces of standing stones, in which letters are represented by groups of notches and strokes cut across or beside a central stemline. The stone in question, measuring at least 1.3 metres in length, was found not standing upright in a field but repurposed as a roofstone inside a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage typically associated with early medieval settlement and used for storage or refuge. It was one of three ogham-inscribed stones reused in this way in the same souterrain at Spiddal. The particular slab, lying in the transverse passage, appears to have been deliberately shaped so that its edges could serve as stemlines, meaning the inscription runs along two of its angles rather than across a flat face. Epigrapher Fionnbarr Moore was able to read one angle as beginning MAQI, a well-attested ogham formula meaning "son of", followed by the partial reading BIQ, with further letters presumably lost or unreadable. The second angle remained entirely out of reach, pinned under the weight of the structure it had been enlisted to support, probably centuries after the words were first carved. The reference to this reading appears in a 1990 publication by Eogan, indicating the stone had been examined and documented by that point, though its full text remains incomplete.