Ogham is an early medieval script, typically carved as a series of notches and strokes along the edge of a stone, and a souterrain is an underground stone-lined passage, often associated with the ringforts, or raths, that dot the Irish countryside. That someone long ago pulled these inscribed stones from their underground chamber and pressed them into service as roof lintels for a cottage says something about how ordinary such objects once seemed in Kerry, where ogham stones are more common than almost anywhere else in Ireland.

The first recorded account of the find comes from Rev. E. Barry in 1891, who noted all six stones but provided details on only five of them, leaving the sixth a mystery from the very beginning. By the time the scholar R. A. S. Macalister examined the situation in 1945, the story had already grown more complicated. Four of the stones had been taken from the souterrain and built into a cottage in the nearby village of Laharan. Three of those four were subsequently removed again and carried to Lord Dunraven's mansion at Adare, County Limerick, where they remain to this day. The fourth stone, the one left behind in Laharan, was by Macalister's time already lost to sight, his own phrase. As for the two stones never removed from the souterrain in the first place, and the unnamed sixth stone Barry failed to describe, their whereabouts are simply not known.