The stone is just over a metre tall and leans slightly southward, its surface thickened with lichen that now obscures much of what was once carefully cut into its edge. What remains legible, at least to trained eyes, is an inscription in ogham, the early medieval script in which letters are represented by groups of notches and strokes cut along a central stemline, most often along the edge of a standing stone. The name recorded here is read as ANM GATTEGLAN, where "anm" is a formula meaning "name of", making the full phrase something like "the name of Gatteglan".

The stone is one of several features gathered onto an oval earthen platform measuring roughly 17.7 metres north to south and 25 metres east to west, rising to about 2.8 metres at its southern end. At that southern edge a recessed area flanked by an upright pillar may represent an original entrance. Elsewhere on the platform there are two possible leachta, which are low stone cairns associated with early Christian commemoration of the dead, as well as a burial area. A curving field boundary to the east may trace the outer limit of the original enclosure. R. A. S. Macalister, who catalogued ogham stones extensively in his 1945 corpus, recorded the full inscription; today only the first three and last four characters are clearly discernible. He also noted that the letter E in the inscription was indicated by a forfid, one of a small set of supplementary characters added to the ogham alphabet to handle sounds not covered by the original twenty letters.

The inscription itself is executed in finely incised scores rather than the bolder notching seen on some other Kerry examples, which may partly explain why it has fared poorly against weathering and lichen growth. The name Gatteglan is otherwise unattested, and without further documentation the person commemorated remains entirely anonymous beyond that single word preserved in stone on a Kerry hillside.