Sweathouse, Cloone, Co. Leitrim

Co. Leitrim |

Utility Structures

Sweathouse, Cloone, Co. Leitrim

A small stone chamber barely tall enough to crouch in sits in a pasture field near Cloone, in County Leitrim.

It is a sweathouse, an Irish form of steam bath that predates the spa by centuries. Before firing began, users would heat the interior with burning turf, rake out the embers, and crawl inside through a low entrance to sweat out ailments ranging from rheumatism to fever. This particular example is a drystone-built, sub-circular chamber measuring roughly 1.42 metres by 1.39 metres across and only 0.72 metres high, set within a surrounding circular mound about 3.1 metres in diameter. A gap on the north-north-west side, just 0.6 metres wide and 0.3 metres high, marks where that entrance once was. The roof has long since collapsed inward, filling the chamber with rubble.

The structure appears on the Cassini edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, depicted but left unnamed, incorporated into a field boundary running roughly north to south. That boundary has since been removed, leaving the mound sitting alone in open pasture. A photograph taken by W. A. Greene, who worked between approximately 1880 and 1940 and whose images are now held by National Museums NI, shows the sweathouse in an earlier state, providing a rare visual record of what it looked like before further deterioration set in. The nearest landmark to orient by is Forge Town, the name given to a crossroads lying about 250 metres to the south-west. The site was brought to wider attention in 2021 by Aidan Harte, project co-ordinator of the Leitrim Sweathouse Project, an initiative dedicated to recording these easily overlooked monuments before they disappear entirely into the landscape.

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