Standing stone, Timoney Hills, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Timoney Hills, Co. Tipperary

Scattered across undulating pasture in County Tipperary, more than two hundred standing stones rise from the fields around Timoney Hills and the adjoining townland of Cullaun, making this one of the densest concentrations of such monuments anywhere in Ireland.

What makes the group stranger still is that nobody is entirely sure what it is. The stones do not appear to follow any obvious astronomical alignment or ceremonial geometry; the Inspector of National Monuments, recording them in 1936, noted that they seemed to be arranged on no particular system, apart from one stone circle in Cullaun. They are all of red sandstone or conglomerate, standing between roughly 0.9 and 1.8 metres above ground, and this particular stone measures 1.05 metres high, rectangular in section, and oriented on a northwest to southeast axis.

By 1934 to 1936, when the Inspector of National Monuments first formally recorded the group, 221 stones remained across the two townlands, 173 in Timoney Hills and 48 in Cullaun. A later survey published in the Archaeological Survey of Ikerrin by Stout in 1984 mapped 245 stones in total, by which point 70 had already been removed, along with five cairns. The cairn is a type of monument typically consisting of a mound of stones, often covering a burial, though no detail about the Timoney cairns survives in the record. What complicates the picture considerably is that all of these stones sit within the landscaped estate of Timoney Park, seat of the Parker-Hutchinson family, and that fact alone has led some to question whether the monuments are genuinely prehistoric or whether they were, at least in part, arranged or augmented during the improvement of the estate grounds. The question has not been resolved, and the stones remain officially designated as National Monument No. 353, ancient or otherwise.

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