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, forming one of the densest concentrations of such monuments anywhere in Ireland.

What makes the site genuinely strange is not just the sheer number of stones but the apparent absence of any obvious pattern to their arrangement. They do not align, they do not march in rows, and with one exception, a stone circle in Cullaun, they seem to follow no discernible system at all.

When the Inspector of National Monuments surveyed the area in 1934 to 1936, he counted 221 stones still standing or lying prostrate, 173 in the townland of Timoney Hills and 48 in Cullaun. Even then, considerable losses had already occurred. A later map published in the Archaeological Survey of Ikerrin, by Stout in 1984, recorded 245 standing stones in total, of which 70 had been removed, along with five cairns that had also disappeared. The stones are all of red sandstone or conglomerate, standing or having stood between roughly 0.9 and 1.8 metres above ground. The particular stone recorded here, designated 4Y on the 1936 survey map, is 1.73 metres tall, rectangular in section, and orientated along a north-south axis, with no packing stones visible around its base. The whole group carries the designation National Monument No. 353.

There is, however, a complication that shadows any straightforward reading of the site. The stones sit on the landscaped estate of Timoney Park, the former property of the Parker-Hutchinson family, and that context has led some researchers to question whether all the stones are genuinely ancient or whether some may have been arranged or repositioned as estate ornament. It is an open question, and one that gives the place an added layer of ambiguity; a landscape that may be prehistoric, may be partly invented, or may be some uneasy mixture of both.

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