For generations, local tradition identified the spot as a sweat house, the small stone chambers once used across rural Ireland as a kind of improvised steam bath, where heated stones would raise the temperature inside to a near-unbearable level and bathers would emerge into cold water or open air. The memory of the place was specific enough to survive even though nothing visible remained above ground, and it included a detail that felt right for a sweat house: the entrance was reached through a tunnel.

The site first appeared in the documentary record on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, produced around 1835, where it was marked as 'Sweat Ho.' It sat on the eastern edge of a farm lane, roughly sixteen metres southeast of a dwelling house, with small outbuildings between the two. A lime kiln, a common agricultural feature used to burn limestone for fertiliser, was noted about fifteen metres to the northeast. By the time the later Cassini edition of the map was produced, the marking had disappeared entirely. When Aidan Harte, Project Co-ordinator of the Leitrim Sweathouse Project, excavated the site in 2022 under licence number 22E0389, what he uncovered was not a sweat house at all. Beneath the pasture at the top of a southwest-facing slope lay a well-preserved corn-drying kiln: a stone-lined bowl-shaped chamber with an internal diameter of 2.9 metres and a height of 1.28 metres, with a lintelled flue extending three metres westward from its base. Timbers survived at the base of the chamber, and the whole structure had been deliberately filled with clay and stones. The excavated area was subsequently backfilled to its original ground level.

The misidentification is itself part of the interest. The low tunnel-like entrance of a corn-drying kiln, used to channel heat up through the grain above, is not so different in appearance from the narrow opening of a sweat house, and the confusion between the two is apparently not unique to Cattan. What the Leitrim Sweathouse Project has quietly demonstrated here is that local memory can preserve the location of a vanished structure across generations with considerable accuracy, even when the name attached to it has drifted.