Standing stone, Timoney Hills, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Stone Monuments
One of the more quietly troubling aspects of the Timoney Hills stone group is not how many stones remain, but how many have disappeared.
When the Inspector of National Monuments surveyed the area in 1934 to 1936, he counted 221 standing stones spread across two adjoining townlands, Timoney Hills and Cullaun in County Tipperary. By 1953, a follow-up by the National Monuments Service found that a field which had contained nine stones now held just one. The particular stone recorded here, designated 2G on the 1934 to 1936 survey map, has since vanished entirely, leaving no surface trace.
The stones themselves, all of red sandstone or conglomerate, ranged from roughly 0.9 to 1.8 metres in height, with the larger examples averaging around 1.5 metres. The 1936 inspector noted that they did not appear to follow any obvious arrangement, with the exception of one stone circle in the Cullaun townland. A later survey, the Archaeological Survey of Ikerrin published by Stout in 1984, put the original total even higher, at 245 stones, and documented that 70 had been removed, along with five cairns that are also now gone. What makes this group additionally complicated is its setting within the landscaped estate of Timoney Park, formerly belonging to the Parker-Hutchinson family. That estate context has led archaeologists to question whether all the stones are genuinely ancient monuments or whether some were arranged or introduced during the landscaping of the grounds. The uncertainty has never been fully resolved, and it hangs over the site in a way that a straightforward prehistoric monument would not.
A circular boulder has been found incorporated into the remains of an old field boundary in the area where stone 2G was mapped, which may be all that now marks its former position. The undulating pasture of the estate sits roughly 730 metres south of Timoney Park itself, and the field that once held nine recorded stones is now effectively empty of the upright stones that made it notable.

