That damage is not incidental. Both sides of the stone appear to have been spalled, the term for when fragments are forcibly chipped or split away from a rock face, and the pattern of the breakage is what makes this particular stone so quietly interesting.

In 1939, the scholar R. A. S. Macalister proposed that the stone had been deliberately vandalised in antiquity, not out of random mischief but with a specific purpose: to destroy an ogham inscription. Ogham is an early medieval writing system used in Ireland and parts of Britain, in which letters are represented by a series of notches and lines carved along the edge of a stone. The edges are precisely where such an inscription would have been. Macalister, a prolific cataloguer of ogham stones, believed someone had gone to the trouble of removing that very surface. His suggestion has never been confirmed, however, and there is currently no physical evidence that an inscription ever existed on the stone. Whether the damage was targeted or simply the result of centuries of weathering and use remains an open question. The stone stands in land that slopes gently toward the southwest, with broad views opening out over the bogs to the west, a position typical of prehistoric standing stones in this part of the Iveragh Peninsula, which is one of the more archaeologically dense regions of County Kerry.