What makes the group at Timoney Hills and Cullaun particularly strange is not just the sheer number of stones, but the fact that nobody is entirely sure whether they are genuinely ancient or the eccentric project of a landed estate.

When the Inspector of National Monuments surveyed the area in 1934 to 1936, he counted 221 surviving stones, 173 in the townland of Timoney Hills and 48 in the neighbouring townland of Cullaun, and noted that the losses were already significant. A map published in the Archaeological Survey of Ikerrin, compiled by Stout in 1984, recorded 245 stones in total, of which 70 had already been removed, along with five cairns, also gone. The inspector described the remainder as a most remarkable group, observing that the stones, all of red sandstone or conglomerate, stood or had stood between three and six feet above the ground. Crucially, he noted they appeared to follow no particular arrangement, except for one identifiable stone circle in Cullaun. The individual stone recorded here, known as stone 3F, measures 1.32 metres in height and is square in cross-section, set into low-lying marshy ground with no packing stones visible around its base. An orthostat, in archaeological terms, simply means an upright stone set into the ground, the basic unit of monuments like stone circles and alignments.

The complication hanging over all of this is the estate itself. The stones sit within the landscaped grounds of Timoney Park, the property of the Parker-Hutchinson family, and that setting has led some to question whether the concentration of stones reflects genuine prehistoric activity or deliberate arrangement during the period of estate improvement. The question has not been resolved, which leaves Timoney Hills in an unusual position: a scheduled national monument, listed as No. 353, whose fundamental character remains genuinely open.