That much sounds unremarkable, given that roughly 360 ogham stones survive across Ireland and Britain. What makes this one unusual is that it almost certainly does not belong in that company at all. Known as the Mount Callan ogham stone and measuring nearly three metres in length, it is now considered to be a relatively recent carving, produced around 1780, and scholars classify it as a "late scholastic" ogham, meaning it was made by someone with a learned but antiquarian interest in the script rather than as a functional early Christian monument.

The inscription was long believed to mark the grave of Conán, a warrior in the retinue of the legendary hero Fionn Mac Cumhaill, and that claim drew the stone into a heated literary controversy of the period. Yet whatever its origins in possible mischief or scholarly enthusiasm, the stone proved unexpectedly consequential. As the scholar de hÓir noted in 1983, it not only fuelled the literary debate surrounding the inscription but also encouraged antiquarian fieldwork in the area and, more broadly, helped stimulate serious academic interest in ogham as a subject of study. A fabrication, or at best a romantic conceit, ended up doing genuine intellectual work.