That is perhaps the most economical summary of what was discovered in a rath, an enclosed ringfort settlement, in the townland of Rockfield Middle in County Kerry. When the souterrain beneath the rath was investigated, the stones were found serving a purely structural purpose, their inscribed edges holding up a roof rather than marking a grave or commemorating a lineage. Ogham is an early medieval script in which letters are represented by notches and lines cut along the edge of a stone, and it was used in Ireland roughly between the fourth and seventh centuries. That six such stones ended up as building material suggests they were already ancient and largely unreadable to whoever repurposed them.

The subsequent history of the stones is a story of dispersal and loss. According to R. A. S. Macalister, writing in 1945, four of the six were lifted from the souterrain and incorporated into a cottage in the nearby village of Laharan. Three of those four were later removed again and taken to Adare Manor in County Limerick, the seat of Lord Dunraven, where they remain. The fourth stone from the Laharan cottage was simply left behind and, as Macalister put it, is now lost to sight. The two stones not removed from the souterrain are unaccounted for in the record. One of the Adare stones was described by Richard Rolt Brash in 1879 as an irregular pillar of pale red sandstone, roughly 1.25 metres above ground, narrowing slightly from base to top, with inscriptions cut along two angles on the same face. Macalister read that inscription as MAQI-RITTE MAQI COLABOT MAQI MOCO QERAI, a genealogical formula of the kind common in ogham, naming a person through successive generations and a tribal affiliation. The stones that began in a Kerry field have ended up in a Limerick manor house, while at least one, possibly more, have vanished entirely.