The rest were scattered across County Kerry in the nineteenth century, and one has never been located at all. Ogham is an early medieval script, most commonly carved along the edges of standing stones, in which letters are represented by series of notches and lines. To find most of the stones from a single site, a visitor would need to travel between three separate locations across Kerry, which says something about how dramatically the archaeology of this corner of Ireland has been dispersed.

The site itself came to light not through excavation but through weather. A storm at the end of the eighteenth century stripped back enough ground at Cill Mhic Uíleáin to reveal seven ogham stones, a possible eighth with only fragmentary traces of an inscription, a cross-inscribed stone, graves, quantities of bone, and the ruins of several houses. The antiquarian John Windele recorded the scene in 1838, and his sketch shows the ogham stones arranged in a rough semi-circle on top of a mound, with a slab-lined grave positioned nearby. The configuration suggested this was no casual scatter of monuments but a coherent early ecclesiastical site. Within a few decades, however, Lord Ventry had removed six of the stones. Four of them, nos. 1 to 4, were repurposed as ornamental features lining the driveway to Burnham House, now Coláiste Íde, between Dingle and Ventry. Stones 5 and 6 were taken to Chute Hall near Tralee. Stone 7 was left behind. A researcher named Hitchcock observed the eighth stone with its fragmentary inscription, but it was recorded by Macalister in 1945 as already unlocated, and it has not been found since.