Sweathouse, Bodorragha, Co. Roscommon

Co. Roscommon |

Utility Structures

Sweathouse, Bodorragha, Co. Roscommon

On the eastern slope of a drumlin in County Roscommon, tucked against a field bank, lies what was once a sweathouse, a form of pre-modern therapeutic bathing structure once common across rural Ireland.

The practice involved heating a small stone chamber with burning turf until the interior reached an intense temperature, then clearing the embers and allowing people to crowd inside to sweat out ailments ranging from rheumatism to fever. What remains today is far less dramatic than the original function suggests: a stone-filled rectangular depression measuring roughly 2.3 metres north to south and 2 metres east to west, sunk to a maximum depth of 1.2 metres, with the line of its original entrance still traceable on the east-south-east side.

The site appears on the 1914 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, which places it among the later-documented examples of a tradition that was already declining by the nineteenth century. It sits approximately 75 metres north-east of a farmstead, with a small east-west stream running just north of the field bank against which the structure is set. The choice of an east-facing drumlin slope, a low glacial hill of the kind that defines much of this part of the midlands, would have offered some shelter from prevailing westerly weather, and proximity to the stream would have been practical for anyone emerging from the heat of the chamber. The rectangular form is somewhat unusual; many Irish sweathouses are roughly oval or beehive-shaped, built from drystone corbelling, so the shape here is worth noting even if the collapsed state of the structure makes further detail difficult to read.

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