It was a sweathouse, the Irish equivalent of a sauna, used for centuries as a folk remedy for ailments ranging from rheumatism to fever. A fire would be lit inside, the chamber heated thoroughly, the embers raked out, and a patient would crawl in and sweat. The stream running immediately to the west was no accident of geography; it was part of the treatment, offering cold immersion once the heat had done its work.

The structure itself is a drystone beehive hut, meaning it was built without mortar, its walls carefully stacked so that the stones corbel inward, each course projecting slightly over the one below until they meet at the top. The internal dimensions are compact, roughly one metre by two, with a height of just under two metres and walls a substantial eighty centimetres thick. The doorway at the south-west is low and narrow, just under a metre tall and barely more than half a metre wide, a size that would force anyone entering to stoop or crawl. The interior walls are darkened with soot, a direct trace of all those fires lit and raked out over what may have been generations of use. The south-western half of the corbelled roof has since collapsed, leaving rubble across the floor of the structure, though enough survives to make the form legible.

Sweathouses of this type are found scattered across Ireland, particularly in Ulster and the northern midlands, though examples in Tipperary are less commonly noted. Most date from the early modern period, though the tradition they represent is considerably older. This one sits in a genuinely remote setting, tucked against a cliff face with a stream close by, and the soot on its walls gives it an immediacy that more visited monuments sometimes lack.