It was simply never recorded by the cartographers who covered this part of County Cavan, which makes its existence feel like a quiet act of persistence against official memory.

The structure is a sweathouse, a type of early Irish sauna or therapeutic sweating chamber used for treating ailments ranging from rheumatism to skin conditions. The method was simple and severe: a fire would be lit inside to heat the stones, the embers raked out, and the user would crawl in through the low entrance and sweat in the residual heat. When Richardson described the Meenaslieve example in 1941, he found a circular dry-stone building of beehive construction, meaning the walls curve inward and upward in the manner of an old-fashioned skep, without mortar. The internal diameter was roughly 1.8 metres and the height about 1.2 metres; the entrance, a tight opening around 0.9 metres high and only 0.4 metres wide, would have required anyone entering to crouch almost to their knees. The lintel above that entrance appears to have been raised at some point, suggesting the original opening was even lower. Two covering slabs that once formed the roof had collapsed inward by the time of Richardson's description, and there was no chimney, consistent with the standard sweathouse design where all heat was retained rather than vented.

Sweathouses of this beehive type are found scattered across Ulster and parts of Connacht, though many are difficult to date precisely and were in use well into the nineteenth century. The Meenaslieve example sits in a modern conifer plantation, which complicates any sense of the landscape it once belonged to, and the site was recorded as not visited at the time of its formal description, meaning the account rests on Richardson's earlier fieldwork rather than later inspection.