Standing stone, Cullaun, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Cullaun, Co. Tipperary

One particular stone in the townland of Cullaun, on the rolling pasture of a north Tipperary estate, has left no trace above ground at all.

It exists now only as a record, designated stone 4C on a survey map, noted between 1934 and 1936 and gone by the time anyone thought to look again. Its disappearance is, in its own quiet way, a fitting emblem for the wider story of this landscape.

The stone belonged to one of the more puzzling concentrations of standing stones in Ireland. When the Inspector of National Monuments mapped the area in the mid-1930s, 221 stones were still accounted for across the adjoining townlands of Timoney Hills and Cullaun, 173 in the former and 48 in the latter. They were all of red sandstone or conglomerate, standing or formerly standing between roughly one and two metres in height. What made them stranger still was their apparent lack of system: no obvious alignment, no clear geometric plan, except for one stone circle in Cullaun. By the time a later survey was published in the Archaeological Survey of Ikerrin in 1984, the count had risen to 245 stones on record, but 70 of those had already been removed, along with five cairns, which are low mounded stone monuments sometimes associated with burials or land boundaries, that had also since vanished. The site sits within the landscaped grounds of Timoney Park, the former Parker-Hutchinson estate, and that setting has prompted genuine uncertainty about whether these monuments are prehistoric at all, or whether they might instead be a relatively modern arrangement laid out as a landscape feature. That question has not been resolved, and it gives the whole cluster an ambiguity that no amount of counting or cataloguing has managed to dispel.

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Pete F
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