Standing stone, Timoney Hills, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Timoney Hills, Co. Tipperary

Scattered across undulating pasture in the townlands of Timoney Hills and Cullaun in County Tipperary, there are more than two hundred standing stones that refuse to arrange themselves into any obvious pattern.

Most stone settings of this kind follow some discernible geometry, whether a circle, an alignment, or a pair. Here, the stones simply accumulate, spread across two adjoining townlands without apparent system, excepting one stone circle in Cullaun. It is the sheer number of them that unsettles the usual categories.

When the Inspector of National Monuments surveyed the area in 1934 to 1936, he counted 221 stones still present, 173 in Timoney Hills and 48 in Cullaun, and recorded that some were upright while others had fallen flat. All were of red sandstone or conglomerate, standing or once standing between roughly 0.9 and 1.8 metres above ground. A later map published in the Archaeological Survey of Ikerrin, compiled by Stout in 1984, plotted 245 stones in total, noting that 70 had already been removed, along with five cairns, a cairn being a mounded heap of stones often associated with burial, that had also disappeared. The stones occupy the landscaped grounds of Timoney Park, the former estate of the Parker-Hutchinson family, and that estate context has prompted some scholars to raise the question of whether all or some of the stones were placed here in more recent centuries as a form of deliberate antiquarian landscaping, rather than surviving from prehistoric times. The honest answer, it seems, is that nobody is entirely certain.

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