Ogham stones, carved with an alphabet of notches and strokes along their edges and used in Ireland roughly from the fourth to the seventh centuries to record names and genealogies, are unusual enough as objects. What makes these particular examples stranger still is the sequence of repurposing they endured before arriving at Lord Dunraven's mansion in Adare, Co. Limerick, where they remain today.

The stones began their recorded modern history in the townland of Rockfield Middle, Co. Kerry, where six of them were discovered reused as roof lintels inside a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage associated with a nearby rath, or ringfort. Barry noted this find in 1891. At some point after their discovery, four of the stones were removed and built into a cottage in the village of Laharan, continuing their role as structural material rather than monument. According to R.A.S. Macalister, writing in 1945, three of those four were subsequently taken to the Dunraven seat at Adare, while the fourth was left behind and is, in his words, now lost to sight. One of the three survivors, designated No. 2 in Macalister's catalogue, had its own additional chapter: it had served as a lintel over the front door of a man named Patrick Quirk before its removal. Brash, writing in 1879, described it as a tall, tapering monolith standing just over two metres high, inscribed on two angles of the same face. Macalister read its inscription as COILLABBOTAS MAQI CORBBI MAQI MOCOI QERAI, a formulaic ogham genealogical text, and suggested it possibly commemorates the father of the person named on a companion stone.

The three stones are held at Adare Manor, the Dunraven estate in Co. Limerick. Access to the stones themselves is not straightforward, as the house is now a private hotel, and the collection is not publicly exhibited in the way a museum would display such objects. Anyone with a serious interest in the inscriptions would do well to consult Macalister's Corpus Inscriptionum Insularum Celticarum or the online records maintained by the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, where the catalogue entries compiled by Nora White provide detailed readings and cross-references to the Kerry findspot.