Ogham is an early medieval script, used primarily in Ireland between roughly the fourth and seventh centuries, in which letters are represented by groups of notches and lines cut along the edge of a stone. The fact that these six were pressed into service as structural roofing material tells its own quiet story about how later generations regarded, or failed to regard, what had come before them.

The stones were recorded by Barry in 1891, but their subsequent history is one of dispersal and loss. According to R. A. S. Macalister, writing in 1945, four of the stones had at some point been lifted from the souterrain and incorporated into a cottage in the nearby village of Laharan. Three of those four were then removed again and taken to Lord Dunraven's mansion at Adare in County Limerick, where they remained. The fourth stone, left behind in Laharan, was described by Macalister as "now lost to sight." A fifth stone fared no better in the documentary record: the Reverend E. Barry offered a reading of it in 1895, transcribing the text as "Corbágn maqi mucoi C...", though Macalister considered this reading improbable. Neither he nor the earlier scholar Brash had ever actually seen the stone, and its whereabouts remain unknown. Of the original six, only the three at Adare can be accounted for with any confidence. What became of the sixth stone is not recorded at all.