Sweathouse, Cuiltaboolia, Co. Roscommon

Co. Roscommon |

Utility Structures

Sweathouse, Cuiltaboolia, Co. Roscommon

In a field bank on the southern slope of a drumlin in County Roscommon, a small stone chamber sits almost entirely swallowed by earth, its presence betrayed only by a low mound rising about forty centimetres above the surrounding ground.

To a passing eye it might read as nothing more than a slight irregularity in the landscape. It is, in fact, a sweathouse, an early Irish equivalent of a sauna, in which heated stones were placed inside the sealed chamber, the occupant crawled in to sweat out illness or pain, and then plunged into cold water nearby. The stream running roughly west to east just sixty metres away would have served exactly that purpose.

The structure itself is circular, built of stone, with an internal diameter of just 1.1 metres and a standing height of 1.3 metres, making it barely large enough for one person to sit upright. A lintelled entrance, meaning one spanned by a flat stone laid across the top rather than formed into an arch, faces roughly south-southwest and measures only half a metre wide and half a metre high, requiring anyone entering to get down very low indeed. The whole thing is built into a field bank on the drumlin slope, so that its upper portion protrudes as a rounded earthen mound measuring about three metres east to west and 2.6 metres north to south. By 1914, when the Ordnance Survey recorded it on their six-inch map, there were no houses marked in the vicinity, suggesting the site had already passed out of active use and living memory of its function was fading. Sweathouses of this kind are found across parts of Ulster and Connacht, and were once a common feature of rural life before formal medicine became widely accessible.

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