Runic inscriptions are rare enough in Scandinavia itself; in Ireland, they are extraordinarily uncommon, which makes the Beginish stone a quietly remarkable object. Carved sometime between 1000 and 1100 AD, it carries two lines of text and, pocked into the surface above the second word, an equal-armed cross.

The inscription was first read by Kavanagh, writing in O'Kelly's 1956 publication, as LIR. RISTI. STIN. ThINA + [MUNUIKL] RISTI. [RUN], translated as "Lir erected this stone; M… carved the runes." It is a formula well known from Scandinavian memorial stones: one person raises the monument, another cuts the letters. The name Lir, however, proved contentious. The Norwegian runologist Johnsen, writing in 1968, argued that the first element more likely reads VERR, an Old Norse personal name rather than an Irish one. A later study by Barnes, Hagland and Page, published in 1997, proposed yet another alternative reading, UIR, and also found the O'Kelly and Kavanagh interpretation of that opening element to be uncertain. Sheehan, Stummann Hansen and Ó Corráin, in a 2001 article in the Journal of Irish Archaeology examining Beginish as a Viking Age maritime haven, concluded that the specialist runologists' readings carry more weight than the earlier translation, even if no single authoritative version has settled the matter entirely. What seems clear is that someone, with a Norse name of some form, had a stone raised on this Kerry island over a thousand years ago, and thought it worth recording who had cut the letters.

The stone itself is no longer on Beginish. It is held at Cork Public Museum, registered as L286, where it can be examined directly rather than imagined against the Atlantic backdrop of the island it once occupied.