That ambiguity is what makes them so quietly unsettling. Most megalithic monuments come with at least a working assumption of prehistoric origin. Here, the fact that the stones sit within the landscaped grounds of the Parker-Hutchinson estate at Timoney Park introduces a persistent question: were these put up by farming communities thousands of years ago, or were some, or many, arranged by estate owners with a taste for the dramatic?

When the Inspector of National Monuments surveyed the area in 1934 to 1936, he counted 221 stones still standing, 173 in Timoney Hills and 48 in Cullaun, and noted that they appeared to follow no particular arrangement or plan, with the exception of one identifiable stone circle in Cullaun. All were of red sandstone or conglomerate, ranging from roughly 0.9 to 1.8 metres in height. A later map published in the Archaeological Survey of Ikerrin recorded 245 stones in total, though 70 had by then been removed, along with five cairns, a cairn being a deliberate mound of stones sometimes used as a burial marker or territorial signal. The particular stone catalogued here, designated 5R1 on the 1934 to 1936 survey map, is a triangular-shaped example standing 1.77 metres tall, rectangular in cross-section, and oriented roughly north-northeast to south-southwest. An additional small upright stone sitting 8 metres to its south did not appear on the earlier map and is thought to have been placed there in relatively recent times, which only adds another layer of uncertainty to a site already full of it.