Standing stone, Timoney, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Timoney, Co. Tipperary

A standing stone that escaped the notice of nineteenth-century mapmakers has a way of making you wonder how many others did the same.

This sandstone monolith on a west-facing hillside in Tipperary measures only 1.4 metres in height, modest by any standard, yet it carries a quiet peculiarity: a visible seam of white quartz runs across its top surface, and the stone itself is flecked with quartz pebble inclusions, giving it a subtly glittering quality that plain sandstone would not. It is rectangular in plan and oriented on a NNE-SSW axis, rising to its apex at the NNE end, an alignment that may or may not be deliberate but is consistent with the kind of directional intention archaeologists often note in prehistoric standing stones.

The stone sits in a field to the northwest of a more celebrated local cluster known as the Timoney Stones, one of the largest groupings of standing stones in Ireland, which makes this outlier easy to overlook. When Ordnance Survey teams walked the same ground in 1843 and again in 1904, neither party recorded it on their six-inch maps, which suggests either that it was obscured, considered unworthy of note at the time, or simply missed. At its base on the NNE side, a small stone projects outward, interpreted as a possible packing stone, the kind of wedge used to stabilise an upright during erection and hold it at the correct angle. Such details are rarely dramatic, but they bring the act of raising the stone into focus: someone planned the angle, sourced the packing material, and set this particular piece of quartz-veined sandstone pointing in a specific direction across a valley that has probably changed considerably in the intervening millennia.

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