Standing stone, Cullaun, Co. Tipperary

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Cullaun, Co. Tipperary

A single upright stone leaning slightly in a Tipperary pasture might not seem remarkable on its own, but this particular orthostat, as standing stones are sometimes called in the archaeological literature, belongs to one of the most puzzling concentrations of such monuments in Ireland.

Spread across two adjoining townlands, Timoney Hills and Cullaun, the group once numbered at least 245 stones, with five cairns also recorded before their removal. By the mid-1930s, when an Inspector of National Monuments made a systematic count, 221 remained, prompting the observation that they formed "a most remarkable group" arranged, as far as anyone could tell, on no particular system, save for one stone circle in Cullaun. The stone here in Cullaun, recorded as 8C on the inspector's map, measures 2.2 metres high, 1.4 metres wide, and just 0.35 metres thick, subrectangular in section and oriented northeast to southwest along its long axis. It is one of seven out of nine stones in its immediate field that surveyors were still able to locate; two others, mapped in the 1934 to 1936 survey, had vanished by the time anyone looked again.

All the stones across both townlands are of red sandstone or conglomerate, and those still standing rise between roughly 0.9 and 1.8 metres above ground. The sheer number of them, running across the undulating pasture of what was the Parker-Hutchinson estate of Timoney Park, has prompted a cautious but persistent question: are they genuinely prehistoric, or were at least some of them arranged or augmented during the landscaping of the 19th-century estate? The Hutchinson family burial ground lies only 75 metres to the north, a reminder that the land was actively shaped and managed during that period. The doubt has never been fully resolved. A later map produced for the Archaeological Survey of Ikerrin, published by Stout in 1984, recorded 245 stones in total, of which 70 had already been removed by that point, along with the five cairns. Whether those losses happened in the distant past or the more recent one is, like much else about this site, unclear.

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