Standing stone, Timoney Hills, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Timoney Hills, Co. Tipperary

A single tapering slab of sandstone conglomerate, roughly 1.4 metres tall, now absorbed into the middle of a drystone field wall, is one of the last survivors of what was once an extraordinary concentration of standing stones across two Tipperary townlands.

At its peak the group numbered at least 221 stones across Timoney Hills and the adjoining townland of Cullaun, with a further survey later counting 245, of which 70 had already been removed along with five cairns. By 1953, a field that had contained nine standing stones on the 1934 to 1936 survey map was noted to hold only this one. The stone itself, an orthostat aligned north to south, is split, with a rough face to the south-east and a smooth flat face to the north-west where the break occurred.

When the Inspector of National Monuments surveyed the group in 1934 to 1936, he described the surviving 221 stones as a most remarkable collection, all of red sandstone or conglomerate, standing between roughly 0.9 and 1.8 metres above ground. He observed that the stones did not appear to follow any particular arrangement, with one exception: a stone circle visible among the 48 stones recorded in Cullaun. The broader setting complicates any straightforward reading of the site. The stones lie within the landscaped grounds of Timoney Park, the estate of the Parker-Hutchinson family, and that association with a designed estate landscape has led to genuine uncertainty about whether the stones are ancient monuments or relatively modern additions to a gentleman's parkland. The question has never been fully resolved.

The surviving stone, catalogued as stone 2J on the 1934 to 1936 survey map and designated National Monument No. 353, sits in undulating pasture to the south of the main estate. It is a quiet, slightly ambiguous thing: old enough to be protected, anomalous enough to resist easy explanation, and now so thoroughly built into a field boundary that the wall and the monument have become almost inseparable.

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