Standing stone (present location), Timoney Hills, Co. Tipperary

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone (present location), Timoney Hills, Co. Tipperary

Scattered across the undulating pasture of the Timoney Hills and the adjoining townland of Cullaun in County Tipperary is one of the most numerically remarkable concentrations of standing stones in Ireland, and also one of the most puzzling.

At their peak, more than two hundred upright stones of red sandstone and conglomerate rose from the ground here, standing between roughly 0.9 and 1.8 metres tall, with no obvious pattern to their arrangement beyond a single stone circle identified in Cullaun. Yet the count has been in steady, troubling decline for the better part of a century, and the question of whether these stones are genuinely prehistoric monuments or something else entirely has never been fully resolved.

When the Inspector of National Monuments surveyed the site in the mid-1930s, he counted 221 stones still standing or present, 173 in Timoney Hills and 48 in Cullaun, and noted that a number had already been eliminated. A later map published in the Archaeological Survey of Ikerrin, by Stout in 1984, recorded 245 stones in total, of which 70 had been removed, along with five cairns that had also disappeared. The deterioration was already dramatic by 1953, when the National Monuments Service noted that in one particular field, where nine stones had been marked on the 1934 to 1936 map, only a single standing stone remained. Four stones survive today in the corner of an adjacent field, possibly displaced remnants of the group once recorded nearby. Complicating any straightforward reading of the site is its location within the landscaped estate of Timoney Park, associated with the Parker-Hutchinson family. The possibility that the stones were arranged or augmented as a form of estate ornamentation, rather than being purely ancient in origin, has been raised and has not been dismissed.

The stones, where they survive, sit in ordinary farm fields, and the sense of something once vast and now quietly diminished is perhaps the most striking quality the place offers. What was described in 1936 as a most remarkable group has become a fragmented and ambiguous one, its losses gradual and largely unwitnessed.

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