Standing stone, Timoney Hills, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Timoney Hills, Co. Tipperary

Scattered across the undulating pasture of a Tipperary estate lie hundreds of standing stones that nobody can quite explain.

The stones at Timoney Hills and the adjoining townland of Cullaun form one of the largest concentrations of standing stones in Ireland, and yet their purpose, their arrangement, and even their age remain genuinely uncertain. Unlike the great megalithic monuments at Newgrange or Carrowmore, these stones follow no obvious pattern. As the Inspector of National Monuments noted in 1936, the stones are not apparently arranged on any particular system, with the sole exception of one stone circle identified in Cullaun.

When the Inspector recorded the site in 1934 to 1936, 221 stones were still standing, 173 in Timoney Hills and 48 in Cullaun, all of red sandstone or conglomerate, ranging from roughly 0.9 to 1.8 metres in height. By the time Stout's Archaeological Survey of Ikerrin was published in 1984, the mapped total had risen to 245, 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 continued. The particular stone recorded here as 7F could not be located at all during later survey work, the field having been overtaken by furze and scrub. What makes the site stranger still is its setting within the landscaped grounds of Timoney Park, the estate of the Parker-Hutchinson family. That context has led some to question whether these are genuinely ancient prehistoric monuments or whether, at least in part, they were arranged or augmented during the era of estate improvement, when landowners across Ireland and Britain occasionally deployed standing stones as ornamental features. The question has not been resolved.

The site sits within private farmland and much of the ground is now heavily overgrown, which means many of the stones are effectively invisible even to those who go looking. The stones that can still be found are modest in scale, easily overlooked individually, but the sheer density of them across these two townlands is what sets Timoney apart from almost anywhere else in the country.

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