Standing stone, Timoney Hills, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Timoney Hills, Co. Tipperary

Scattered across undulating pasture in County Tipperary, the standing stones of Timoney Hills form one of the largest concentrations of such monuments in Ireland, and yet the question of whether they are genuinely prehistoric remains, stubbornly, open.

Over two hundred stones of red sandstone and conglomerate, ranging from roughly one to nearly two metres in height, spread across two adjoining townlands, Timoney Hills and Cullaun, with no obvious arrangement beyond a single stone circle identified in Cullaun. That absence of pattern is itself unusual. Most megalithic groupings, even loose ones, reveal some underlying geometry upon closer inspection. Here, the stones simply accumulate across the landscape, as if deposited rather than placed.

When the Inspector of National Monuments surveyed the site between 1934 and 1936, he counted 221 surviving stones and described the group as a most remarkable one. 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 had also disappeared. The stones sit within the landscaped estate of Timoney Park, which was the property of the Parker-Hutchinson family, and it is that detail which has given archaeologists pause. The suspicion, never fully resolved, is that at least some of the stones may have been arranged or augmented during the improvement of the estate grounds, a practice not unknown among eighteenth and nineteenth century landowners with a taste for antiquarian atmosphere. Whether the core of the group is genuinely ancient or partly confected remains unclear.

Visiting today presents its own complications. The specific stone recorded here as 7V in the surveyed group could not be located during more recent fieldwork, because the field in question had become overgrown with furze and scrub vegetation. The broader site is within private estate land, and much of it has effectively been reclaimed by the undergrowth, making any systematic exploration of the stones a matter of some difficulty.

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