The Tipperary Antiquarian

Equinox setting-sun at Lisheentyrone stone pair In March 2014 I visited this stone pair to examine whether it may be potentially be aligned to the Equinox sun-set / sun-rise. Amazingly enough when there I discovered a panel of cup-marks that had previously not been noted before. This was North Tipperary's first confirmed find of rock-art and as such opens up the area as one where more art is likely to be found. To cap off what personally was a great delight it also appears that the standing stone pair are also aligned towards the Equinox sun-set. Since then I have wondered about whether at Equinox sun-rise, that the standing stones may cast a significant shadow onto the rock-art panel itself. Astronomical alignments are beginning to be understand at rock-art panels around the world so it wouldn't be without precedent. The weather has not been conductive to checking this year but hopefully over the next few Equinox's it may become apparent.

Present remains of Church at Kilmore After watching the talk on Dermot F Gleeson by Danny Grace as part of the Gleeson Clan Gathering I felt his research on Tipperary would have a lot to offer. Looking through the papers he wrote on JSTOR the first one that caught my eye was "What was a "Cloghinkelly". Included in The Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland in 1953, this short piece that he wrote intrigued me. One because I've never heard of a Cloghinkelly and two because it relates to a few early Christian sites that I have been looking at over the last few years. Remains at Latteragh He refers to some documents from the 1600s which relate to the holdings of church lands in the Diocese of Killaloe. Included within in these holdings are a Cloghinkelly. So to resurrect a question that to my knowledge hasn't been answered, just what was one of these? Gleeson quotes a line " the vicarage of Lattrah, and ye Cloninkellies of Kilmor...

The setting-sun within the passage on the Autumn Equinox 2014 Situated on Slievenamuck which makes up one half of the Glen of Aherlow is Tipperary's only confirmed passage tomb. However I do think there are at least two other passage tombs in Tipp, one on top of the Mahurslieve near Kilcommon and another on top of Slievenamon. This passage tomb is described on Archaeology.ie as follows; "On the summit of Shrough Hill, part of the Slievenamuck/Moanour mountains, with forestry encroaching to within 10m to N, E and W, forestry to W has been felled affording an extensive view of the Galty mountains and foothills below. A stone wall runs E-W along the S edge of the mound. The monument consists of a roughly circular cairn (diam. 30m; H 2m) with a small, roofless polyogonal chamber (int. dims. L 2.2m; Wth 1.2m), aligned roughly E-W, near the centre of the cairn (De Valera and Ó Nualláin 1982, 101; Ó Nualláin and Cody 1987, 76-8). The sidestones vary in height from 1.2m to 1....

I first spotted the name Catstone on one of the old 1840's maps for the Dromineer area. It of course reminded me of the famous Catstone at Uisneach in Co. Westmeath, thought to be the mythical centre of Ireland. Cats Stone marked on the old 1840's maps (Copyright NMS) It is in the townland of Shannonhall and marked as a redundant record in the SMR. Archaeology.ie describes it as follows "Situated just off crest of rise in very undulating pastureland. Large conglomerate of sedimentary rock, obviously layered with quartz pebbles. This is a large, roughly rectangular erratic (3.4m x 2.5m; H 1.3m on N side; H 2.2m on S side) resting on ground surface. Not an archaeological monument, though it is marked on 1st (1840) ed. as 'Stone' with typical depiction of pillar stone." I visited it one day a couple of years ago to see what it looked like and it does look similar to the one at Uisneach. As above there was nothing to suggest it is anything other than ...

Who was the first person to live or step foot in the County of Tipperary? Cave on Knockadoon (Lough Gur) I suppose first you have to look at where and when the first people arrived in Ireland? For a long time the earliest human settlement dated in Ireland was to what we call the Mesolithic or between 8000 - 4000 BC. Traditionally the consensus suggested that a location at Mount Sandel in County Derry showed the earliest evidence of human settlement and dates to circa 8000BC. Since then, the reexamination of a bear bone from the "Alice and Gwendoline" cave in the Burren has tentatively pushed the date back further in the Paleolithic period which basically is anything from 8000BC back to 2.6million years ago! Dr Marion Dowd & Dr Ruth Canden and their team reexamined a cut mark on the bear bone and they suggest that it must have been made by a human. Tests on the bear bone date it to approx. 10,500BC...