Timoney is a wild spot, with lots of woodland, fields and animals.
|
|
Tucked away in a corner of North Tipperary and just inside the Laois border is a little known collection of some 300 standing stones. The stones are spread across several fields and through the woods on the Timoney Hills near the village of Knock. The Timoney stones are a bit of an anomaly, seeming to fit into no definite archeological category. There may not be anything else like them in Western Europe except Carnac in France. There is not much published information to refer to, either. |
|
|
|
A
selection of the Timoney stones. There are many stones of various sizes
scattered across the Hills. |
 |
The Stones cover quite a large area of farm and woodland, and the stones remaining today are probably only a portion of the number that stood originally. There are lots of fieldwalls here, some of which are of great size. Some of the stones are quite small, and stick out of the ground like stumps. There is no apparent order or reason to the distribution of stones, which would make me wonder if they are not the result of field clearance in the last century or two. When I asked locally for any information or stories about the stones, the most I could get was that the agent's men used to run races around the stones. It doesn't sound like a very old tradition. A thought that has occurred to me is that perhaps the stones were a folly erected as a folly by a local landlord? |
