Ogham stone (present location), Baile An Ghóilín, Co. Kerry

They are ogham stones, early medieval monuments inscribed in ogham, an alphabet that encodes letters as a series of notches and strokes cut along a central stem line, typically the edge of a stone. One of them carries an inscription that reads DUBONIRRAS MAQQI TENAC(I), a personal name followed by the word for "son of" and a father's name, the standard formula of these monuments. The stone itself is just under a metre tall, moderately narrow, and the inscription runs along both angles of its southern face in a direction described as down dexter and up sinister, which is itself unusual among surviving examples.

The four stones now at Coláiste Íde did not begin their existence as driveway features. They came originally from Ballinrannig townland, from a site known as Cillvickillane or Cill Mhic Uíleáin, where a storm at the end of the eighteenth century stripped back the land and exposed a remarkable cluster of early Christian remains: seven ogham stones, a possible fragment of an eighth, a cross-inscribed stone, graves with slab linings, quantities of human bone, and the ruins of several structures. The antiquarian John Windele visited and sketched the site in 1838, recording the ogham stones arranged in a rough semi-circle on top of a mound, with a grave slab positioned close by. In the mid-nineteenth century, Lord Ventry removed six of the seven stones from the site. Four came to Burnham House, the property that would later become Coláiste Íde; two others were taken to Chute Hall near Tralee, where they remain. The seventh stone was left at Ballinrannig and is still there. The inscription on this stone was examined by the scholar R. A. S. Macalister, who noted in 1945 that the final two letters of TENAC(I) were damaged, the C faint but traceable, and the concluding I, in his assessment, purely conjectural.