Standing stone, Timoney Hills, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Timoney Hills, Co. Tipperary

Scattered across the undulating pasture of Timoney Park in County Tipperary are the survivors of what was once one of the largest concentrations of standing stones in Ireland, and possibly one of the most puzzling.

More than two hundred stones, of red sandstone and conglomerate, once occupied two adjoining townlands here, arranged with no obvious pattern or alignment, except for a single stone circle in the townland of Cullaun. They do not march in rows, they do not form a clear monument. They simply stand, or stood, at intervals across the grass, as if placed without ceremony or forgotten intention.

When the Inspector of National Monuments surveyed the area between 1934 and 1936, he counted 221 stones still upright or recoverable across Timoney Hills and Cullaun, noting that a number had already been lost. By the time the Archaeological Survey of Ikerrin was published in 1984, the picture was worse: 245 stones had been mapped in total, but 70 had been removed, along with five cairns, a type of stone mound often associated with burial, that have since disappeared entirely. The individual stone recorded here, one of eleven in this particular field alone, is modest in scale, 0.85 metres high and rectangular in section, oriented north to south, with no packing stones visible around its base. It was catalogued as stone 5G on the 1934 to 1936 survey map. What complicates the entire site is the fact that all of these stones sit within the landscaped estate of the Parker-Hutchinson family at Timoney Park. That setting has led some to question whether the stones are genuinely ancient monuments or whether they were, at least in part, arranged or augmented by estate improvers in a later century, a practice not unknown among landed families with a taste for the antiquarian and the atmospheric.

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Pete F
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