Standing stone, Timoney Hills, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Timoney Hills, Co. Tipperary

Scattered across the undulating pasture of Timoney Park in County Tipperary are the remains of what was once one of the largest concentrations of standing stones in Ireland, and nobody is entirely sure why they are there.

By 1936, some 221 stones had been counted across the two neighbouring townlands of Timoney Hills and Cullaun, all of them cut from the same red sandstone or conglomerate and ranging from roughly 0.9 to 1.8 metres in height. A later survey mapped as many as 245, though 70 had already been removed by that point, along with five cairns. The stones show no obvious arrangement or alignment, with one exception: a single stone circle in the townland of Cullaun stands apart from the general scatter.

When the Inspector of National Monuments surveyed the site in 1934 to 1936, he described the group as "a most remarkable" collection, while noting that a number had already been "eliminated." In the field containing this particular stone, labelled 6H on his mapping, he found 12 stones still upright and 23 lying flat. The complication is the setting itself. Timoney Park was the landscaped estate of the Parker-Hutchinson family, and the possibility that at least some of the stones were positioned or repositioned as estate ornament during the eighteenth or nineteenth century cannot be ruled out. Whether any are genuinely prehistoric monuments, garden features, or some mixture of both remains an open question.

The individual stone catalogued here could not be relocated during more recent survey work, buried as it now is under dense scrub vegetation. The broader grouping across Timoney Hills and Cullaun is protected as National Monument No. 353, but the site rewards a cautious approach: what looks like ancient prehistory may, in part, be something considerably more recent and considerably more deliberate in a different way.

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