When workmen broke ground on a field boundary in 1838 within the Dunloe Castle demesne in County Kerry, they uncovered a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber of the kind used in early medieval Ireland for storage or refuge, that had been roofed with nine large slabs. Six of those slabs were ogham stones, their inscriptions face-down as lintels. A seventh stood upright inside the passage, propping up a larger stone that had cracked at some point in antiquity. Bones and skulls, some reportedly human, were found inside.

Ogham is an early medieval Irish script, typically carved as a series of notches and strokes along the edge or angle of a standing stone, and the Coolmagort stones represent a remarkable concentration of it. The stone now designated KE065-041001 is 2.1 metres tall and carries a well-preserved inscription along its dexter angle, the right-hand edge when facing the stone, reading DEGOS MAQI MOCOI TOICAKI. The formula is a standard one in ogham epigraphy, naming an individual and his tribal or kindred group. There is a detail that catches the eye of anyone reading closely: the final S of DEGOS was missed during the original carving and added afterwards on the broad face of the stone, a small correction made by whoever was doing the work, preserved in stone for over a millennium. A small encircled equal-armed cross appears on the face that was turned upward when the stone lay as a souterrain lintel, suggesting the stone had a further life, or at least a further moment of inscription, somewhere in its history. In 1940 the Office of Public Works removed all seven ogham stones from the souterrain and set them upright near a public road. The underground chamber was filled in, and nothing now marks where it stood. The stones themselves have since been studied as part of the Ogham in 3D project run by the School of Celtic Studies at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, which has produced detailed digital records of the inscriptions.