They are not ornamental. Each one carries ogham, an early medieval script in which letters are represented by groups of notched or scored lines cut along the edge of a stone, and each one was removed from a burial site several kilometres away by a nineteenth-century landlord who appears to have regarded them as suitable garden features.

The stones came originally from Ballinrannig townland, at a site known as Cillvickillane or Cill Mhic Uíleáin. They lay undisturbed until a storm at the end of the eighteenth century exposed an extraordinary concentration of material: seven ogham stones, a possible fragment of an eighth, a cross-inscribed stone, a number of graves with quantities of bone, and the ruins of several houses. The antiquarian John Windele visited and sketched the scene in 1838, recording the ogham stones arranged in a rough semi-circle on top of a mound, with a slab-lined grave nearby. Some decades later, Lord Ventry removed six of the seven stones from the site. Four of them, including the stone now numbered as no. 1, were set along the driveway of Burnham House, the building that later became Coláiste Íde. The remaining two went to the grounds of Chute Hall near Tralee, while the seventh stone was left at Ballinrannig, where it still stands.

The Coláiste Íde stone numbered as no. 1 stands 1.18 metres high and is approximately 0.40 metres wide and 0.22 metres thick. Its inscriptions run along two angles of the southern face. The right angle reads MAQQI CUNITTI, and the left reads, with some letters now partially or wholly lost, (M)A(Q)QI QETTI(A). Scholars including Macalister, Brash, and Ferguson all recorded readings of the stone across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and their accounts preserve letters that have since faded or worn away entirely. One detail remained contested: a faint notch after the final I of the second inscription, which Macalister initially counted as an A in 1897 but dropped from his reading by 1945. The stone itself, meanwhile, continues to stand in a driveway, doing the work of a boundary marker for a school that almost certainly had no say in how it got there.