The ogham stone known as Rathkenny II sits embedded as a lintel over the passage leading to the northern chamber of a souterrain, an underground stone-built tunnel system typically associated with early medieval ringforts and used for storage or refuge. What makes the situation quietly remarkable is that the inscription, scored in the early Irish ogham alphabet along the stone's edge, was almost certainly carved long before anyone thought to repurpose the stone as building material. The partial reading recovered from the visible left-hand angle runs oLisSeGVOG, though the stone's full extent remains unknown because so much of it is locked within the structure itself.

The souterrain sits within a ringfort called Lismore, or An Lios Mór, a multivallate rath on rising ground in Rathkenny, Co. Kerry. Multivallate means the enclosure is defined by multiple banks and ditches rather than a single ring, and Lismore has three such banks and fosses surrounding a circular interior. The ringfort commands wide views of the surrounding land, which was likely part of its purpose. Rathkenny II is one of four ogham stones found within the souterrain, suggesting the passage was constructed or repaired at some point using already-ancient inscribed stones as convenient raw material, a practice that was not unusual in early medieval Ireland. An opening made into one of the souterrain's chambers in the late 1970s left the drystone walling of the tunnels and chambers clearly exposed. The inscription on Rathkenny II has been documented as part of the Ogham in 3D project, run by the School of Celtic Studies at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, which used three-dimensional scanning to capture details of stones that are damaged, partially buried, or otherwise difficult to read directly. The recorded dimensions of the visible portion are 0.82 metres long, 0.24 metres wide, and 0.19 metres deep.