Standing stone, Timoney Hills, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Stone Monuments
Scattered across undulating pasture in County Tipperary, more than two hundred standing stones rise from the ground without any obvious pattern or alignment, which is itself part of what makes the site so quietly perplexing.
The stone recorded as 3A is a single example from a cluster of six in one field alone, an irregular, roughly square-sectioned orthostat standing 1.35 metres high on a natural rock outcrop, with no packing stones at its base to suggest it was ever formally set into the earth.
When the Inspector of National Monuments surveyed the area between 1934 and 1936, he counted 221 stones still standing across the two adjoining townlands of Timoney Hills and Cullaun, and noted that a considerable number had already been removed. A later survey published in the Archaeological Survey of Ikerrin mapped as many as 245 stones in total, along with five cairns, and recorded that 70 of the stones and all five cairns had been taken away by then. The surviving stones are all of red sandstone or conglomerate, ranging from roughly 0.9 to 1.8 metres in height, and the Inspector's 1936 description observed that they appeared to follow no particular arrangement, aside from one identifiable stone circle in the townland of Cullaun. What makes the whole assemblage harder to read is that the stones sit within the landscaped estate of Timoney Park, the former Parker-Hutchinson estate, a fact which has led some researchers to question whether all or some of the monuments are genuinely prehistoric, or whether the estate's ornamental landscaping may have introduced or rearranged stones at some point.

