At a burial ground in County Kildare known as Killeen Cormac, a fragment of inscribed stone once lay hidden in plain sight, built into an enclosing wall. Whoever dismantled it and used it as construction material probably gave little thought to the marks carved along its edge, yet those marks turned out to be ogham, an early medieval script in which letters are represented by a series of notches and strokes cut along a central stem line, most commonly found on upright standing stones commemorating the dead.

The stone is one of seven ogham stones recorded at Killeen Cormac by the scholar R.A.S. Macalister in 1945. This particular fragment carried an inscription he read as MAQI-DDEC[CEDA] MAQI MARIN, with the damaged portion indicated by brackets. Ogham inscriptions of this type follow a familiar early Irish formula: they name a person and their parentage, almost always in the genitive case, meaning the stone essentially reads as belonging to or commemorating that individual. The translation offered by the Ogham in 3D project, a collaboration of the School of Celtic Studies at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, renders it as "of Mac-Deichet son of Marinus". The name Marinus is a Latin one, which is not unusual; Roman names appear in several ogham inscriptions from Ireland and point to the complex cultural contacts of the early Christian period. The stone itself is no longer at Killeen Cormac. It was removed to the National Museum of Ireland, where it remains today, leaving the wall at Colbinstown without the carved fragment that had, unknowingly, been holding a piece of early medieval biography together.