That displacement is itself part of the story. Ogham, for those unfamiliar with it, is an early medieval script rendered as a series of notches and strokes cut along the edge of a stone, read from bottom to top. What makes this particular piece unusual is not just its journey from one province to another, but that it was never a standing monument in the first place. It served as a roof-slab, a structural element covering a souterrain, which is an underground stone-built passage or chamber typically associated with early medieval settlements and used for storage or refuge.

The stone, made of soft shale or clay slate and measuring 1.72 metres in length, came from a souterrain at Underhill in County Cork, where it was found alongside two other ogham-inscribed stones. That a single underground structure yielded three ogham stones is remarkable in itself. The inscription on this slab, cut in fine knife-strokes rather than the broader chiselling more commonly seen, reads as [A?]DARUN M[A]CI COLAL[I?], a formula typical of early ogham, giving a personal name followed by the word meaning "son of" and a father's name. The damaged letters introduce some uncertainty into the reading, acknowledged in the scholarly literature by O'Kelly and Shee in 1968 and later by Damian McManus in his 1997 survey of ogham inscriptions. The practice of reusing ogham stones as building material, as happened here, was not uncommon; by the time many souterrains were constructed or modified, the original commemorative or boundary function of such stones had long faded.

The stone is now held in Dublin's south city, having been removed from its Cork findspot for study and preservation. Visitors hoping to read the inscription in person should check with the institution currently holding it, as access to individual artefacts in museum or university collections can vary. The fine knife-cut nature of the lettering means it rewards close inspection rather than a quick glance, and some familiarity with ogham's vertical axis and stroke-counting system helps enormously when trying to make out the individual characters along the stone's edge.