Standing stone, Cullaun, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Stone Monuments
A single upright stone of red sandstone, barely knee-high, standing in a field of undulating pasture on the Tipperary estate of Timoney Park might seem unremarkable on its own.
Its significance lies in what surrounds it, or rather in what once surrounded it. This stone is one of sixteen that together formed a circular arrangement, and that circle was itself just one small part of a far larger and deeply puzzling concentration of standing stones spread across two adjoining townlands.
When the Inspector of National Monuments surveyed the area between 1934 and 1936, he counted 221 surviving stones across Timoney Hills and Cullaun, a figure that already represented a reduced total. A later map published in the Archaeological Survey of Ikerrin recorded 245 stones in all, of which 70 had been removed, along with five cairns that have also since disappeared. The 1936 inspector described the group in notably candid terms: the stones, he wrote, were "not, apparently, arranged on any particular system" apart from the one obvious stone circle in Cullaun. All are of red sandstone or conglomerate, and in his time stood between roughly 0.9 and 1.8 metres above ground. The field containing this particular stone was known locally as the "racecourse field", a name that tells its own quiet story about how local memory can drift away from prehistory and towards more familiar uses of open land. The specific stone recorded here, designated 9J on the inspector's survey map, is rectangular in section, orientated north to south on its long axis, and measures 0.9 metres high by 0.42 metres wide.
One complication hovers over the whole complex. The stones sit within the landscaped grounds of Timoney Park, the estate of the Parker-Hutchinson family, and this setting has led some researchers to question whether the monuments are genuinely ancient or whether the estate's owners may have had a hand in their arrangement or proliferation. The question has not been resolved, and it gives even this modest, solitary orthostat, a term for an upright standing stone, a slightly unresolved character: ancient ritual landscape, Victorian landscape feature, or something caught ambiguously between the two.

