Standing stone, Timoney Hills, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Stone Monuments
One of the strangest things about the standing stones of Timoney Hills is not how many there are, but how many there were, and how quietly that number has been shrinking.
Spread across undulating pasture on what was once the landscaped estate of Timoney Park, this field contains part of what was once an extraordinary concentration of upright stones, the kind of grouping that would be nationally significant if its origins were beyond doubt. The particular stone recorded as 5T1 in surveys from the 1930s cannot currently be found at all; no surface remains are visible at the spot where it was mapped.
When the Inspector of National Monuments recorded the site between 1934 and 1936, he counted 221 stones still standing across the two adjoining townlands of Timoney Hills and Cullaun, noting that 173 lay in Timoney Hills and 48 in Cullaun. He described them as a most remarkable group, all cut from red sandstone or conglomerate, ranging from roughly three to six feet in height, with the taller ones averaging around five feet. He noted that the stones did not appear to follow any deliberate arrangement, with one exception: a stone circle in Cullaun that stood out clearly from the rest. By the time Geraldine Stout published the Archaeological Survey of Ikerrin in 1984, the picture had grown more sobering still. Her map showed 245 stones in total, of which 70 had already been removed, along with five cairns, a cairn being a mound of stones often associated with burial. All five cairns were gone. The overall count, and the continued losses, point to a site that has been eroding steadily for generations.
What complicates the story is the setting itself. The stones sit within the grounds of Timoney Park, the former estate of the Parker-Hutchinson family, and that context raises a question that has never been fully resolved: whether these monuments are genuinely prehistoric or whether some or all were placed here as landscape features during the era of the demesne. The doubt is not conclusive, and the concentration of stones across two townlands is striking enough to resist easy dismissal, but it means that Timoney Hills occupies an uncertain position, somewhere between ancient monument and elaborate folly, which may be the most interesting thing about it.

