This one, an ogham stone from Monataggart in County Cork, spent part of its recorded life buried under farm rubbish. Ogham is an early medieval script used primarily in Ireland, in which letters are represented by groups of notches and strokes cut along the edge of a stone, and the Monataggart example carries an inscription that has been almost entirely swallowed by time and circumstance.

The stone came to light some time after 1873, close to three other ogham stones found in the same area, all of which were eventually removed from the locality. This one was not. The scholar R.A.S. Macalister, who catalogued ogham stones across Ireland in the mid-twentieth century, found it lying in the farmyard at Monataggart and managed to read the inscription as VERGOSO MACI LLOMINACCA, a formula typical of early ogham stones, in which MACI means "son of" and the surrounding names identify an individual by patronymic. When Macalister went back to verify his reading, however, the stone had been completely covered with farm rubbish and could not be re-examined. By 1992, when it was inspected again, it had migrated to a position beside a field fence near the same farmyard, and only a few faint scores of the original inscription remained visible.

What the Monataggart stone illustrates, quietly and without drama, is how precarious the survival of such objects can be outside formal preservation. Three of its neighbours were taken away and survive in traceable form; this one stayed put, passed through farmyards, accumulated rubbish, and lost most of its text to weathering and neglect. Macalister's reading may be the closest anyone ever gets to what it once said.