Standing stone, Timoney Hills, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Timoney Hills, Co. Tipperary

One of the more quietly disorienting things about the standing stones of Timoney Hills is not what is there, but what is not.

A field in County Tipperary that once held nine upright stones, carefully mapped by the Inspector of National Monuments in the 1930s, now shows no surface remains at all. The stone catalogued as 2D on that 1934 to 1936 survey has simply gone, along with its three near neighbours, 2A, 2B, and 2C. Four displaced stones lying in an adjoining field to the north-east may be the same ones, toppled and shifted at some point between the survey and a follow-up visit in 1953, when inspectors noted that only a single standing stone remained in the field.

The wider group to which these stones belong is extraordinary in scale. Spread across the townlands of Timoney Hills and Cullaun, the Inspector of National Monuments counted 221 stones still standing in 1936, all of red sandstone or conglomerate, ranging from roughly 0.9 to 1.8 metres in height. A later survey published in the Archaeological Survey of Ikerrin put the original tally higher still, at 245 stones, with 70 already removed by that point and five associated cairns, stone mounds of likely prehistoric origin, also gone. The 1936 description noted that the stones did not appear to follow any obvious arrangement, with one exception: a clear stone circle in the Cullaun townland. That absence of a discernible plan has made interpretation difficult. Adding a further layer of uncertainty, the stones sit within the landscaped estate of Timoney Park, once the property of the Parker-Hutchinson family, and their position on a managed demesne has led some to question whether all of them are genuinely ancient or whether some may have been arranged or re-arranged during the estate's development.

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