Sweathouse, Carrickleagh, Co. Louth

A sweathouse, roughly circular in plan and barely one and a half metres across, was built into the rock using dry-stone walling and small boulders. The principle was simple enough: a fire would be lit inside to heat the stone, the embers raked out, and a person would crawl in through a low doorway to sweat in the retained heat, much as one would in a sauna. The practice was once widespread across Ireland, used as a folk remedy for ailments ranging from rheumatism to fever.

The 1835 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map shows a small cluster of houses near this spot, suggesting the sweathouse once served a modest local community. By the time it was last formally inspected, in 1966, the structure had already collapsed. It has since been removed entirely. What survives is partly photographic: the Reverend Seamus Quinn, who served as parish priest of Knockbridge between 1927 and 1954, photographed the sweathouse while it still stood, showing a rounded corbelled roof and a rectangular doorway. That image, preserved courtesy of Elizabeth McArdle, is now the clearest record of how the structure once looked, a domed little chamber tucked against the rock, unremarkable to a passing eye but carrying a very particular kind of local knowledge about the body and its ailments.