What gives the Timoney Hills group its particular edge is the question that quietly follows a visitor around the field: are these ancient at all? The stones sit within the landscaped grounds of Timoney Park, once the Parker-Hutchinson estate, and that fact alone has led archaeologists to wonder whether the monuments are the genuine prehistoric article or something rather more recent in origin.

When the Inspector of National Monuments surveyed the area in 1934 to 1936, he counted 221 surviving stones, 173 of them in the townland of Timoney Hills and a further 48 in the adjoining townland of Cullaun, and described the group as a most remarkable collection. A later survey published in the Archaeological Survey of Ikerrin in 1984 mapped 245 stones in total, though by then 70 had already been removed, along with five cairns. The stones are all of red sandstone or conglomerate and stand, or once stood, between roughly 0.9 and 1.8 metres above ground. They appear, as the inspector noted, to follow no obvious arrangement, with the single exception of a stone circle in Cullaun. The individual stone described here, catalogued as stone 3D on the 1934 survey map, is a slim upright, just under a metre tall and roughly rectangular in plan, with a top that tapers to a point. A cluster of holly bushes has since grown tightly around it, making any close inspection difficult, and a second stone that the original map shows standing a few metres to the north can no longer be located.

The unresolved question of whether these stones are genuinely prehistoric or a later, perhaps ornamental, arrangement within a designed landscape is part of what makes Timoney Hills so unusual. Most megalithic sites come with an assumed antiquity; here, that assumption itself becomes part of what you are looking at.