Site of Sweat House, Ballynacroghy, Co. Westmeath

The sweat house at Ballynacroghy had already been levelled, yet they recorded it anyway, marking the spot on both the OS Fair Plan and the six-inch sheet with the notation "Site of Sweat Ho." That act of conscientious annotation is now the most substantial thing left of a structure whose purpose was, in its time, thoroughly practical.

Sweat houses were small, low stone buildings, sealed almost entirely except for a narrow entrance, used as a form of thermal therapy. A fire would be lit inside, the embers cleared, and a person suffering from rheumatism or other complaints would crawl in and sweat for a period before plunging into cold water nearby. They were once relatively common across the Irish midlands and north, and their disappearance from the landscape has been gradual and largely unrecorded. The Ballynacroghy example fits a pattern often observed with such structures, clustered in agricultural land that was steadily reorganised and cleared across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The site sits in an area of grassland, with a feature identified on maps as "Raheen" immediately to the north-east, a name suggesting a small ringfort, the kind of circular earthwork enclosure that served as a farmstead in early medieval Ireland. Shanwallia House lies roughly eighty metres to the south, indicating that by the early nineteenth century this was already settled, managed land with little tolerance for obsolete small buildings.