What makes the Timoney Hills stones particularly unusual is not just their number but the uncertainty that clings to them: their presence on the landscaped estate of Timoney Park has led archaeologists to question whether these are genuinely ancient monuments at all, or whether some or all of them were arranged or re-arranged by a landowning family with a taste for the antiquarian aesthetic.

When the Inspector of National Monuments surveyed the area in 1934 to 1936, he counted 221 stones still standing or lying prostrate across two adjoining townlands, Timoney Hills and Cullaun, and described them as a most remarkable group. All were of red sandstone or conglomerate, ranging from roughly 0.9 metres to 1.8 metres in height, with the larger ones averaging around 1.5 metres. A later map published in the Archaeological Survey of Ikerrin, compiled by Stout in 1984, recorded as many as 245 stones in total, of which 70 had already been removed, along with five cairns, a type of prehistoric stone mound, that had also disappeared. The one exception to the general disorder was a single stone circle in the Cullaun townland, which at least suggested a deliberate prehistoric arrangement. The individual stone recorded here measures 0.9 metres high, is subrectangular in plan, and is orientated on a north to south axis, with no packing stones visible around its base. It forms part of a smaller cluster of four stones within the wider scatter, and carries the designation National Monument No. 353.

The estate in question belonged to the Parker-Hutchinson family, and it is their landscaping work that introduces the ambiguity. Landed families across Ireland and Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries occasionally moved or erected standing stones as features of designed landscapes, sometimes deliberately evoking a sense of ancient mystery. Whether that happened here, and to what extent, remains unresolved. The stones look old. The question is whether looking old was, at least in part, the point.