Standing stone, Timoney Hills, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Timoney Hills, Co. Tipperary

Scattered across undulating pasture in the Tipperary townlands of Timoney Hills and Cullaun, there are more than two hundred standing stones, none of them arranged in any pattern that archaeologists have been able to pin down with confidence.

That absence of obvious order is itself part of what makes the site unusual. Most prehistoric stone settings, even loose ones, gesture towards alignment or enclosure. Here, the stones simply appear across the landscape, singly and in clusters, fashioned from red sandstone and conglomerate, standing between roughly a metre and a metre and a half out of the ground.

When the Inspector of National Monuments surveyed the area in 1934 to 1936, he counted 221 stones still in place, 173 of them in Timoney Hills and 48 in the adjoining townland of Cullaun, with one exception to the general scatter: a recognisable stone circle in Cullaun. A later map published in the Archaeological Survey of Ikerrin recorded 245 stones in total, though by that point 70 had been removed and five associated cairns, small mounded stone structures, had also disappeared. The whole complex sits within the landscaped grounds of Timoney Park, the estate of the Parker-Hutchinson family, and that setting introduces a complication that archaeologists have not fully resolved. The proximity to a nineteenth-century demesne, where landowners routinely rearranged and embellished their grounds with antiquarian features, has led to genuine uncertainty about whether these stones are prehistoric monuments or, at least in part, the product of more recent landscape fashioning.

The individual stone recorded as 7T on the survey map could not be located at the time of recording, the field having been overtaken by furze and scrub vegetation. That practical difficulty is itself telling: even a site of this scale, formally designated as National Monument No. 353, can become effectively invisible within a generation of neglect.

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