Before it was re-erected beside a public road in County Kerry, it spent an unknown length of time lying on its side, serving as a roof slab inside an underground passage, with its inscription facing down into the dark. It was never intended for that role. Ogham stones, tall pillar stones carved with an early Irish script that uses a series of notches and lines along a central stem, were almost certainly erected as commemorative or boundary markers. Whatever sequence of events repurposed this one as structural material, the change left a small but telling trace: a lightly incised, encircled equal-armed cross on the face that was uppermost when the stone served as a lintel.

The stone came to light in 1838, when workmen cutting a field boundary across a slight rise in the demesne of Dunloe Castle accidentally broke into a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage of the kind built in early medieval Ireland, often for storage or refuge. Inside, they found something extraordinary: seven ogham stones had been incorporated into the structure, six of them as roofing slabs and a seventh standing upright within the passage. Human bones and skulls were also found. Six of the nine roof slabs bore inscriptions, which means the builders of the souterrain either had ready access to a notable collection of ogham stones or deliberately dismantled an earlier monument to construct it. In 1940, the Office of Public Works removed all seven stones from the souterrain and re-erected them close to the road. The underground passage was then filled back in, and no surface trace of it now remains.

The stone described here stands 2.1 metres high and carries the inscription DEGOS MAQI MOCOI TOICAKI along its dexter angle, the right-hand edge when facing the stone. The formula, naming a person and their tribal or kin group, is typical of early Irish ogham commemorations. One detail catches the eye of specialists: the final S in the inscription was missed and then corrected by carving it onto the broad face of the stone rather than the angle, a small slip by the original carver, preserved for perhaps fifteen hundred years. The unusual letter form known as the forfid K also appears, a variant character used in a minority of ogham inscriptions. The stone has since been digitally recorded as part of the Ogham in 3D project run by the School of Celtic Studies at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies.