Standing stone, Timoney Hills, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Timoney Hills, Co. Tipperary

Scattered across undulating pasture in County Tipperary is one of the largest, and most puzzling, concentrations of standing stones in Ireland.

Dozens of rough-hewn uprights rise from the grass of what was once the Parker-Hutchinson estate of Timoney Park, and the sheer density of them would be striking enough on its own. What makes the site genuinely strange is that nobody is entirely certain whether they are prehistoric at all.

When the Inspector of National Monuments recorded the stones in 1934 to 1936, he counted 221 survivors across two townlands, 173 in Timoney Hills and 48 in the adjoining townland of Cullaun. A later survey published in the Archaeological Survey of Ikerrin mapped 245 stones in total, noting that 70 had already been removed, along with five cairns that have since vanished entirely. The stones are all of red sandstone or conglomerate, standing between roughly 0.9 and 1.8 metres in height, and the 1936 description noted that they appeared to follow no obvious arrangement, with the single exception of one stone circle in Cullaun. The particular stone recorded here measures 1.52 metres tall and sits with its long axis oriented roughly north-northwest to south-southeast. What the Inspector called "a most remarkable group" has never been fully explained, and the fact that these stones sit within a landscaped 19th-century estate has led some researchers to question whether they are genuinely ancient monuments or, at least in part, a later antiquarian arrangement. That uncertainty has not been resolved.

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