Standing stone, Timoney Hills, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Stone Monuments
A field in County Tipperary holds what may be one of the largest concentrations of standing stones in Ireland, or possibly something considerably more recent.
Across the townlands of Timoney Hills and Cullaun, more than two hundred upright stones of red sandstone and conglomerate are scattered across undulating pasture, without any obvious geometric plan apart from one stone circle in Cullaun. They do not march in rows, they do not form an avenue, and they do not appear to encode any particular astronomical alignment. They simply stand there, irregularly distributed, ranging from roughly 0.9 to 1.8 metres in height, which is the kind of arrangement that makes interpretation genuinely difficult.
When the Inspector of National Monuments surveyed the area in 1934 to 1936, he counted 221 surviving stones and called them a most remarkable group. A later map published in the Archaeological Survey of Ikerrin, compiled by Stout in 1984, recorded 245 stones in total, of which 70 had already been removed, along with five cairns that have also since disappeared. The stone designated 3M on the 1934 to 1936 survey map is one of 17 recorded in a single field; it now stands at the base of a thorn bush, roughly square in cross-section, measuring 1.2 metres tall and about 0.65 metres across. There are no packing stones visible around its base, which is one of the details that complicates the picture, since prehistoric standing stones are typically supported by smaller stones wedged into the socket pit. The whole group sits on the former Parker-Hutchinson estate of Timoney Park, and that fact has led some to question whether the stones are ancient monuments at all, or whether they were arranged, augmented, or repositioned during the landscaping of a Georgian demesne. No firm conclusion appears to have been reached on that question, which leaves the Timoney Hills stones occupying an unusual position: simultaneously listed as National Monument No. 353 and quietly contested.

