It is not a grave marker or a boundary stone in any conventional sense. It is an ogham stone, one of those early medieval pillars inscribed in a writing system unique to Ireland and parts of western Britain, in which letters are represented by notches and strokes cut along the edge of the stone. The rath, or ringfort, the circular earthwork enclosure it belonged to, is gone, ploughed or eroded out of the landscape at some point before the nineteenth century. But the stone survives, displaced and repurposed, carrying a name that time has half-erased.

Ogham script was in use roughly from the fourth to the seventh century, and inscriptions typically record a personal name in the genitive case, often following the formula "X, son of Y". This stone reads TALAGNI MAQ, which translates as something like "of Talagna, son of..." and then nothing. The stone is broken just after the Q, the standard abbreviation for MAQQI, meaning "son of", and whatever name followed is missing. The two nineteenth-century scholars who recorded it, Windele in 1848 and Brash in 1879, both noted the inscription before its current state was fully assessed. The stone itself measures 1.08 metres high, 0.36 metres wide, and 0.24 metres thick, with the ogham characters cut along one of its angles. It was originally used either as a lintel or a jamb stone in a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber typically associated with a rath, used for storage or refuge. That secondary use, as structural material in a hidden passage within a now-vanished earthwork, is itself a small story about how a community several centuries after the inscription was carved found a perfectly practical use for an old standing stone and had no particular reason not to.