Standing stone, Timoney Hills, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Timoney Hills, Co. Tipperary

Scattered across undulating pasture in County Tipperary, hundreds of standing stones dot two adjoining townlands with no obvious pattern to their arrangement.

That absence of pattern is itself the puzzle. Most megalithic monuments, however enigmatic, betray some underlying geometry, some alignment with a horizon or a neighbouring feature. Here, with the exception of one stone circle in the townland of Cullaun, the stones simply stand, apparently at random, in the rolling fields of what was once the Parker-Hutchinson estate of Timoney Park.

When the Inspector of National Monuments surveyed the area in 1934 to 1936, he counted 221 survivors across the two townlands of Timoney Hills and Cullaun, and described them as a most remarkable group. All are of red sandstone or conglomerate and stand, or once stood, between roughly 0.9 and 1.8 metres above ground. A later map published in the Archaeological Survey of Ikerrin recorded as many as 245 stones in total, noting that 70 had already been removed, along with five cairns, a cairn being a mound of stones typically raised over a burial. By any count, this is an unusually dense concentration. The particular stone catalogued here measures just over a metre in height, rectangular in section, and is orientated east to west along its long axis. It was recorded as stone 5L1 on the survey map and forms part of a cluster of 46 stones identified within the same field. What complicates the picture considerably is the estate setting. The location of the stones within the landscaped grounds of Timoney Park has led some researchers to question whether these are genuinely ancient monuments or whether they were arranged, or rearranged, by estate owners at some point in the eighteenth or nineteenth century, when it was fashionable among the Anglo-Irish gentry to populate their demesnes with antiquarian ornaments. That question has not been definitively resolved, and it gives the whole site an unsettled quality, somewhere between prehistory and garden folly.

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