Standing stone, Timoney Hills, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Timoney Hills, Co. Tipperary

One field in County Tipperary once held nine standing stones.

By 1953, only one remained upright. By early 2015, even that was gone, its base having broken so that the stone now lies flat on the pasture. The stone in question, catalogued as 2H on a survey map from the 1930s, is a sandstone conglomerate orthostat, roughly 1.5 metres long and rectangular in section, with one flat edge and one side that curves to a point at the top. An orthostat is simply a large stone set upright in the ground, and this one shows no trace of the packing stones that would typically have been wedged around its base to keep it stable.

This fallen stone belongs to one of the more peculiar concentrations of standing stones in Ireland. When the Inspector of National Monuments mapped the area between 1934 and 1936, he counted 221 stones spread across two adjoining townlands, Timoney Hills and Cullaun, all of them red sandstone or conglomerate and ranging from roughly 0.9 to 1.8 metres in height. He noted that they did not appear to follow any particular arrangement, with the exception of one clear stone circle in Cullaun. An earlier survey published by Stout in 1984 had recorded as many as 245 stones across the area, along with five cairns, but by that point 70 of the stones and all five cairns had already been removed. The losses continued: nine stones were mapped in the field containing stone 2H in the 1930s, and within two decades only one was left standing. That the stones sit within the landscaped grounds of the Parker-Hutchinson estate at Timoney Park has led some to question whether they are genuinely ancient monuments or whether the estate's landscaping history has complicated the picture.

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