That sheer density is what sets Timoney Hills apart. Most megalithic monuments announce their purpose through geometry; a ring, an avenue, a passage. Here, the red sandstone and conglomerate uprights appear to follow no particular arrangement, which makes the site as puzzling as it is striking.

When the Inspector of National Monuments surveyed the area in 1934 to 1936, he counted 221 stones still in place, spread across two adjoining townlands: 173 in Timoney Hills and 48 in the neighbouring townland of Cullaun. He noted one exception to the general scatter, a stone circle in Cullaun, but beyond that the arrangement resisted easy explanation. The stones, standing between roughly 0.9 and 1.8 metres above the ground, were all of the same geological material, suggesting they were selected and placed during a single period of activity. By the time Stout's Archaeological Survey of Ikerrin was published in 1984, the original count had been revised upward to 245 stones, of which 70 had been removed, along with five cairns, the term for roughly mounded stone heaps that can mark burials or boundaries. The individual stone described here, catalogued as stone 5C on the 1934 to 1936 survey map, is now broken and measures 1.4 metres in height, rectangular in section and oriented east to west along its long axis, with no packing stones visible around its base. The fact that the stones sit within the landscaped grounds of the Parker-Hutchinson estate at Timoney Park has led some to question whether the monuments are genuinely ancient or were repositioned or augmented during estate improvement works, a not uncommon practice in eighteenth and nineteenth century Ireland, when landowners occasionally arranged or rearranged field antiquities for aesthetic effect.