Standing stone, Cullaun, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Cullaun, Co. Tipperary

Scattered across undulating pasture in County Tipperary, the standing stones of Timoney Hills and Cullaun form one of the most numerically extraordinary concentrations of upright stones in Ireland, and yet the question of whether they are genuinely ancient monuments or elaborate landscaping features remains unresolved.

The particular stone recorded here, designated 9F on a survey map, has left no visible trace above ground at all. Of the eight orthostats once identified in this field, only two still stand.

When the Inspector of National Monuments surveyed the area in 1934 to 1936, he counted 221 stones still in place across the two adjoining townlands of Timoney Hills and Cullaun, with 173 in the former and 48 in the latter. He described them as a most remarkable group, noting that they showed no obvious systematic arrangement, apart from one identifiable stone circle in Cullaun. All were of red sandstone or conglomerate, standing between roughly 0.9 and 1.8 metres above ground. A later survey published in the Archaeological Survey of Ikerrin recorded 245 stones in total, indicating that as many as 70 had already been removed by the time of that mapping, along with five cairns, a cairn being a mound of stones typically raised over a burial. The numbers alone are striking, somewhere between a prehistoric ritual landscape and something harder to categorise. The stones sit within the landscaped estate of Timoney Park, associated with the Parker-Hutchinson family, and that proximity to a designed estate has led some to question whether all or part of the grouping dates to antiquity at all, or whether the arrangement reflects the improving tastes of a landed estate rather than the intentions of a prehistoric community.

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