Hut site, Termons, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Termons, Co. Kerry

On a rough, southward-sloping pasture above Lough Currane in County Kerry, two small rectangular structures sit among scree, largely overlooked by the visitors who come to the Iveragh Peninsula for its coastline and mountain passes.

They are modest things, easy to dismiss as field clearance or collapsed walling, but their form suggests deliberate construction for human habitation, the remnants of hut sites whose occupants would have looked out over the same lough that still stretches below.

The first structure is defined by a series of upright stones averaging around half a metre in height, their arrangement tracing a rectangular plan. Just over five metres to the northeast lies a second, more overgrown example, measuring roughly three metres by one and a half metres, with surviving wall height of around one and a half metres and walls approximately seventy centimetres thick. That wall thickness is notable; it points toward construction intended to last and to retain heat, the logic of anyone building a small shelter in an exposed Kerry hillside. The site sits within the townland of Termons, a placename derived from the Irish tearmann, meaning sanctuary or church land, which hints at the broader ecclesiastical and settlement history of this stretch of the Iveragh Peninsula. The two structures were documented in the archaeological survey of the peninsula compiled by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan, published by Cork University Press in 1996.

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Pete F
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