Standing stone, Cullaun, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Stone Monuments
Scattered across undulating pasture in County Tipperary, the standing stones of the Timoney Hills and Cullaun townlands form one of the strangest concentrations of upright stones in Ireland, yet they remain almost entirely unknown outside specialist circles.
The stone in Cullaun that carries the designation 6A on survey maps is a modest thing by any measure, roughly 0.95 metres tall, square in section, and cut from red sandstone. Taken alone it would barely warrant a second glance. What gives it weight is the company it keeps.
By the mid-1930s, when the Inspector of National Monuments carried out a systematic survey, 221 stones were still standing across the two townlands, 173 in Timoney Hills and 48 in Cullaun. The inspector described them as a most remarkable group, noting that they showed no obvious arrangement or alignment, with one exception: a single stone circle in Cullaun that stands apart from the general scatter. All the stones are of red sandstone or conglomerate, and in their original state they ranged from roughly 0.9 to 1.8 metres above the ground. A later survey published in the Archaeological Survey of Ikerrin recorded 245 stones in total, though by then 70 had already been removed, along with five cairns that had also disappeared from the landscape. The group sits within the landscaped grounds of Timoney Park, formerly the Parker-Hutchinson estate, and that setting has introduced a persistent question that no one has yet resolved with certainty: whether these stones are genuinely prehistoric monuments or whether at least some of them were arranged, added to, or repositioned during the improvement of a nineteenth-century demesne. The doubt is noted in the record, but it remains unresolved.

