Standing stone, Timoney Hills, Co. Tipperary

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Timoney Hills, Co. Tipperary

Scattered across undulating pasture in County Tipperary, the Timoney Hills stones form one of the most concentrated and perplexing groupings of standing stones anywhere in Ireland, and yet the one recorded as 5D on the survey map is simply no longer there.

No surface trace remains. That absence is, in its own way, typical of this site, where the stones have been disappearing for a very long time.

When the Inspector of National Monuments recorded the group between 1934 and 1936, he counted 221 stones spread across two adjoining townlands, Timoney Hills and Cullaun, ranging from roughly 0.9 to 1.8 metres in height, all of red sandstone or conglomerate. His description was careful but candid: the stones showed no obvious arrangement or pattern, apart from one stone circle in Cullaun. By the time Stout's Archaeological Survey of Ikerrin was published in 1984, the original tally had risen to 245 on earlier records, but 70 had been removed, along with five cairns. The group sits within the landscaped grounds of Timoney Park, the former estate of the Parker-Hutchinson family, and that setting has prompted some scholars to question whether all of these stones are genuinely ancient monuments or whether some may have been introduced or rearranged during the ornamental landscaping of the estate. It is a question that has not been fully resolved, and it complicates what might otherwise seem like a straightforward prehistoric landscape.

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