Sweat House, Carrickrevagh, Co. Leitrim
Co. Leitrim |
Utility Structures
On an east-facing woodland slope above a stream cutting through a deep ravine in County Leitrim, a small collapsed structure of large boulders marks the remains of a sweat house.
These were a distinctly Irish form of rudimentary sauna, used for therapeutic purposes well into the nineteenth century. A fire would be lit inside the low stone chamber until the walls were thoroughly heated, the embers raked out, and the user crawled in to sweat out ailments ranging from rheumatism to fever. The structure at Carrickrevagh is now in a ruinous state, its roughly rectangular chamber measuring approximately 1.6 metres in length and 1.45 metres in width, with what may have been an entrance opening at the southern end.
The site has a recorded history stretching back at least to the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, produced around 1835, where it is marked with the straightforward label 'Sweat Ho.' That early mapping also places the structure in a revealing spatial context: it sits roughly 12 metres east of a cashel, a type of stone-walled early medieval enclosure, and appears to have been more or less centrally positioned among a cluster of nearby dwellings, the closest of which was around 160 metres to the north-north-east. The implication is that the sweat house served a small local community rather than a single household. The site was formally reported in September 2021 by Aidan Harte, Project Co-ordinator of the Leitrim Sweathouse Project, an initiative documenting what turns out to be a surprisingly dense concentration of these structures across the county.