At Keeloges in County Leitrim, though, this modest arrangement of stones, measuring roughly 2.4 metres east to west and 1.4 metres wide, is believed to be a sweathouse. These small stone structures were used across Ireland, particularly in Ulster and Connacht, as a form of therapeutic heat treatment. A fire would be lit inside, the ashes raked out, and the patient would crawl in through a low entrance and sit in the residual heat, much as one might use a sauna. The possible entrance here faces east, and the structure as it stands is roofless, its original corbelled or slab cover long gone.

What makes this site particularly interesting is its cartographic history and its immediate surroundings. The sweathouse does not appear on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map, drawn around 1835, but it is clearly named on the later Cassini edition, suggesting it was either recorded belatedly or came to prominence at some point in the intervening decades. It sits against the outer face of a cashel, a type of early medieval stone-walled enclosure, though that cashel is itself poorly preserved and largely grassed over. The proximity of the two structures raises quiet questions about continuity of use across very different periods. About ten metres to the south stands a small roofless structure, possibly a farm outbuilding or a very small dwelling, also visible on the Cassini map, which gives the immediate landscape something of a layered, accumulated quality. The site was reported in September 2021 by Aidan Harte, Project Co-ordinator of the Leitrim Sweathouse Project, an initiative dedicated to identifying and recording these often overlooked structures across the county.