Standing stone, Timoney Hills, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Timoney Hills, Co. Tipperary

Scattered across undulating pasture in County Tipperary, the Timoney Hills standing stones represent one of the largest concentrations of such monuments in Ireland, and yet a quiet uncertainty hangs over the whole assemblage.

The particular stone recorded as 3Q on a survey map of the site has vanished entirely; no surface trace remains where it was once marked. That absence is itself part of the story here, because attrition has been the defining condition of this landscape for a long time.

When the Inspector of National Monuments surveyed the area in 1934 to 1936, he counted 221 stones still standing or lying prostrate across the two townlands of Timoney Hills and Cullaun, describing them as "a most remarkable group." The stones, all of red sandstone or conglomerate, ranged from roughly 0.9 to 1.8 metres in height, with the larger examples averaging around 1.5 metres. They appeared to follow no obvious arrangement, with the single exception of a stone circle identified in Cullaun. By the time Matthew Stout published the Archaeological Survey of Ikerrin in 1984, the original tally had risen to 245 stones recorded across the area, but 70 of those had already been removed, along with five cairns, a cairn being a mound of stones typically raised over a burial. The losses have continued. What was already a diminished field in the 1930s has grown thinner still. Complicating the picture further is the fact that the stones sit within the landscaped grounds of Timoney Park, the estate of the Parker-Hutchinson family, a setting that has led some to question whether all the monuments are genuinely ancient or whether any were repositioned or introduced during the improvement of the demesne.

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