Hut site, Termons, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Termons, Co. Kerry

On a south-facing slope above Lough Currane in County Kerry, a small circular foundation sits half-swallowed by the hillside, its walls no longer recognisable as walls so much as a low ridge of earth and stone.

The structure is a drystone hut, built without mortar in the manner common across early Irish settlement sites, and what remains amounts to a rough ring roughly 4.6 metres across, its interior filled with debris, its highest surviving point just half a metre above the surrounding scree. What makes the location quietly notable is not the ruin itself but its placement: it was built directly against the townland boundary to the east, suggesting that whoever constructed it understood, and worked within, a landscape that was already organised and claimed.

The site sits on rough grazing land on the Iveragh Peninsula, that broad southwestern finger of Kerry that curves out into the Atlantic. Recorded in the archaeological survey of the peninsula compiled by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan and published by Cork University Press in 1996, the hut is part of a small scatter of remains. A substantial drystone wall, twelve metres long, runs close by to the west and may have served the same settlement or enclosure, and other ruined structures nearby may represent further huts, though their original function is no longer clear. Taken together, the grouping hints at a small working presence on this hillside, people occupying a marginal, stony slope with a long view south over the lake below.

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Pete F
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