This is what was found in 1838 when workmen cutting a field boundary across a slight rise in the Dunloe Castle demesne in Coolmagort, County Kerry, broke into a souterrain, an early medieval underground passage or storage chamber, that had been quietly sealed for centuries. Nine slabs roofed the structure, six of which bore ogham inscriptions, that early Irish script carved as a series of notches and strokes along the edges of stone. One of the larger inscribed stones had cracked at some point in the distant past and had been propped upright by a seventh ogham stone wedged into the passage. Along with the stones, a number of bones and skulls were recovered, some reportedly human.

The stones themselves almost certainly predate the souterrain, which was probably built sometime in the early medieval period. Whoever constructed it had access to a stock of older inscribed monuments and used them pragmatically as raw building material, a reuse that was not uncommon but that leaves scholars working with incomplete and sometimes damaged texts. One of the seven, the stone now catalogued as KE065-041006, stands 0.86 metres high and measures up to 0.29 metres wide. It served as a packing stone above two others in the structure. Its top is broken and one edge was chipped off in antiquity, so the inscription is partial. R. A. S. Macalister, the scholar who catalogued hundreds of Irish ogham stones in his 1945 corpus, read the surviving portion as MAQI-DECEDA MAQ[I, a formula naming a person as the son of someone whose name is now lost, the closing letters having gone with the missing section of stone. In 1940 the Office of Public Works removed all seven stones from the souterrain and erected them near a public road. The souterrain was filled back in and nothing of it is visible above ground today.