Standing stone, Timoney Hills, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Stone Monuments
Scattered across undulating pasture in County Tipperary, the Timoney Hills stones present one of the stranger puzzles in Irish field archaeology.
More than two hundred standing stones spread across two adjoining townlands, Timoney Hills and Cullaun, with no obvious geometric arrangement to explain them, except for one stone circle in Cullaun. The individual stone described here is modest enough, a rectangular slab of roughly a metre in height, orientated north to south, but its interest lies entirely in what surrounds it.
When the Inspector of National Monuments surveyed the area in 1934 to 1936, he counted 221 stones still in place, 173 in Timoney Hills and 48 in Cullaun, and noted that they were all of red sandstone or conglomerate, standing or having stood between three and six feet above ground. He described them as "a most remarkable group" while conceding that they appeared to follow no particular system of arrangement. A later survey published by Stout in 1984 mapped 245 stones in total, of which 70 had already been removed, along with five cairns, also gone. The numbers alone are arresting; concentrations of standing stones on this scale are exceptionally rare in Ireland. What complicates the picture considerably is that all of these stones sit within the landscaped estate of Timoney Park, which was the property of the Parker-Hutchinson family. That setting has led archaeologists to question whether the stones are genuinely prehistoric monuments or whether some or all of them were placed, moved, or arranged as features of a designed landscape. The question has not been definitively resolved, and the stones occupy an uneasy position between ancient monument and ornamental curiosity.

