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 occupy the townlands of Timoney Hills and Cullaun, making this one of the largest concentrations of such monuments in Ireland.

What makes the site genuinely puzzling is not just the sheer number of stones but the apparent absence of any discernible pattern. They are not aligned, not arranged in rows, and, with the exception of one stone circle in Cullaun, seem to follow no obvious prehistoric logic. Each stone is of red sandstone or conglomerate, standing roughly between 0.9 and 1.8 metres above ground, and they share enough consistency in material and scale to suggest, at minimum, a common source and perhaps a common purpose, whatever that may have been.

When the Inspector of National Monuments surveyed the area in 1934 to 1936, he recorded 221 stones still standing or lying prostrate, describing them as "a most remarkable group." A later map published in the Archaeological Survey of Ikerrin put the original total at 245, of which 70 had already been removed along with five cairns. The individual stone described here, marked as stone 3R on the 1934 to 1936 survey map, is a subrectangular block measuring 1.06 metres high, orientated on a northeast to southwest axis, with no packing stones visible around its base. It sits within the landscaped grounds of Timoney Park, the former estate of the Parker-Hutchinson family, and that setting introduces a nagging question. The stones' location on a managed ornamental estate has led some researchers to doubt whether all of them are genuinely ancient monuments or whether some were arranged or repositioned during later landscaping. The question has not been definitively resolved.

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