In line with the Victorian insistence that explanations should be as free as possible from excitement or sin, it has generally been accepted that sweathouses were resorted to as a prophylactic sauna-treatment for aches and pains.

But far more aches and pains could have been incurred in heating a sweathouse than would ever have been alleviated. For a start, the entrance is as little as 75 cms high. To light a turf fire, maintain it and sweep out the ashes, ans strew the floor with bracken or rushes was no easy task. Even if the roof were partly dismantled to put the turf in, this would have been almost as awkward as bringing or throwing it in through the entrance - and the hot ashes would still have had to be swept out.

Myles McMorrow recounted that : Each person brought a leaf of cabbage and put it on his head to keep the head cool and avoid headaches. An hour or so being spent in continuous perspiration the patient clothed himself and hastily hurried home. He then betook himself to bed having had a hot drink of whey prior to retiring.
Those old people found continuous relief from pain from the fore-mentioned process.

In a society where everyone had rheumatic pains and arthritis at the very least, and where it was regarded as the normal human condition, it is it really likely that sweathouses several hundred metres from the nearest (stone) house, holding a maximum of 5 people in considerable discomfort and some risk of fainting or even burning, would have been used for the uncertain alleviation of aches and pains ?

click on the picture for a better photo

Tirkane, county Derry, with shallow well in foreground.
Photo taken in 1974.

The better-off rubbed themselves with poitín and patent rubs on sale at markets and fairs; the poorer drank what they could get - poitín, or, in mid-Ulster, ether - to ameliorate bodily discomfort. In any case, sauna treatment is of no avail to such complaints as sciatica, arthritis, and the aching backs still suffered by a high proportion of the more mature population. Arthritic hands and feet would be relieved more easily and effectively by immersion in warm peat-ash from an overnight fire than by squatting uncomfortably in a tiny, dark place.

Nevertheless, there is this account on the Duchas site:

There was one on Phil Ward's land in Deffier [county Leitrim] and the walls were there up to ten or twelve years ago. Joseph & Thomas Mahon saw it being used.
The people suffering were also bled at the sweat house if sweating was not able to bring relief.
The sweat house was beside the old house Terry (Turlough) Lynch was born in. He could bleed and sweat but not as good as the Lynchs before him. The Lynches for generations bled people.
If fever was supposed the sufferer was brought to the sweat house and if not relieved by sweating was bled.

Also this:

In a place locally known as Claghan in the townland of Carrickhue [county Derry] there lived an old woman in the middle of the last century who was well known all over the parish for being able to cure many ills which existed at that time. There was no surgical operations for internal diseases such as appendicitis so all such cases were taken to old Martha Douglas as she was called for treatment. In the garden she had what was known as the "Sweat House" constructed much to the design of a lime kiln. Here the patient was placed rolled up in blankets on a large flat stone with a fire underneath. This operation continued from twelve to twenty four hours. Then the patient was removed and placed in a bed where she administered medicine made from herbs. After three or four days' treatment the patient was completely cured.
Old Martha never told the secret of her cures which died with her. But for many years the "Sweat House" stood until at last it was removed to make way for the plough.

click to enlarge

Sweathouse doorway seen through a hole in the corbelled roof,
Cuiltia, county Leitrim

If they were not used for prophylactic purposes, why would sweathouses (never more than 1.75 metres high internally and two metres in internal diameter) be built in such numbers ? (It is safe to assume that those which survive represent a tenth or less of the total built just in the county Leitrim.) What else could they have been used for ? And when were they introduced ?

A hole in the corbelled roof photographed from inside the sweathouse at Annacarney in county Wicklow,
far from the current (surviving) main distribution, but in a remote location. (Click the picture for more.)

Mrs McLoughlin of Tullynafreave (Leitrrim) claimed in 1992 that her maternal great-grandfather built the sweathouse standing some 50 metres from her modern dwelling to save his wife the trouble of travelling to the sweathouse in neighbouring Meenaslieve. She said that her grandmother and perhaps her mother also had used it, and did not think that their spouses had done so. But whether this is an isolated example of late construction (say around 1885) is impossible to determine. Similarly, it is impossible to establish a connection with the coal-mines (in use from the late eighteenth to the late twentieth centuries) that are at the heart of the present distribution of sweathouses - now reported also from south-west Scotland.

Sweathouses are, of course, part of a circumpolar phenomenon which produced the now well-known Finnish sauna. The Turkic tribes who moved from central Siberia and eventually overthrew the Byzantine Empire, seem to have easily adapted to the Byzantine and Roman steam-bath, producing the hammam or Turkish Bath. The North American form was the sweat lodge, used not for mere hygienic reasons, but for spiritual and physical purification, and sometimes as part of the initiation procedures for boys' passage into manhood. We can be sure that the Finnish sauna was not used for merely hygienic reasons before the 19th century obsession with cleanliness as the prime virtue took hold in the Protestant countries of the North.

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Gubnaveagh, county Leitrim

The first Turkish Bath to be established in the British Isles was in county Cork in the 1860s - so there is no likelihood that it inspired simple Irish sweathouses, concentrated much farther north.

The Finnish sauna was an offshoot from a Siberian-Mongolian practice, so it is reasonable to suppose that the Irish sweathouse came from Scandinavia via the Vikings or their Gallowglass successors in the Northern Isles at some time between the 10th and the 15th centuries. That they are not found near the Viking settlements can be explained by the subsequent Norman and English occupation and expansion of those areas.

Before their secularisation, saunas were part of the universal combination of religious, medicinal and psycho-therapeutic modes which have only recently, like much else, been split off and compartmentalised by Western science and pseudo-science. Our culture has, as a consequence, taken 'exotic' and exciting elements of other cultures' psycho-social therapies (coffee, cocoa, tobacco, cocaine, cannabis and so on) as mere stimulants and 'highs'. The Turks made the public hammam a part of quasi-religious male confraternity. The Finns have likewise made the communal sauna a kind of men's club. Sweating is one of the many ways of altering consciousness, particularly when it is part (as sometimes in North America) of a series of tests and ordeals - and especially when it is done in the dark. But there is no evidence that the small Irish sweathouses were used in the distinctly religious and reverential way that the large North American sweat-lodges were used - and such a highly-evolved function is most unlikely. Something that few people allow themselves to realise is that many Native Americans were much more emotionally mature than the European invaders, who had (and have) destructive technologies way beyond their wisdom or insight or sensibility.

The medicinal psycho-therapy of Siberia and Mongolia, which is still practised by shamans both male and female, involves mushrooms (Fly Agaric), alcohol, sweating and rapid cooling, fasting, whirling, sleep-deprivation and so on. These produce visions and out-of-body experiences, and are aids to achieving more aware states of consciousness than 'Western values' approve of, whereby the shaman-practitioner can see causes of illness or malaise, and the non-shaman can be suitably awed by the psychic forces released by the unblocking effects of physical ordeal and psychoactive drugs.

Herodotus describes the Scythian practice of altering consciousness through cannabis by throwing the seeds on hot stones inside a tent and inhaling the vapour - the smoking of cannabis and opium is a rather late development. Long before the Scythian incursions, however, cannabis seems to have been inhaled at La Hougue-Bie on the island of Jersey, where 21 pottery vessels marked with burnt resin were found in the untouched chamber recently discovered. Consciousness-improving substances have, of course, been found also in other European sites: the Iron Age site of Wilmersdorf, for example, where remains of cannabis were found in an urn.

Sweathouse with unusually large and grand entrance
recalling a passage-tomb, Annagh Upper, county Leitrim

Closer to Ireland there have been serious suggestions that the "burnt mounds" also known as "ancient cooking-places" or fulachta fíadh, found in huge numbers in Ireland - and also in Britain - might have been used as sweat-lodges in the North American style, or as places for warm-water bathing. These shallow ponds, heated by rolling hot stones into them, could have had many purposes, of course - and warm baths would have been an obvious secondary function.

Could Irish sweathouses be a continuation of a tradition as old as the fulachta fíadh ? They are very flimsy structures, easily subject to total demolition by livestock, and would survive from prehistoric times only through the most extraordinary circumstances - so no evidence is likely to emerge. None has ever been excavated.

Their general disuse seems to have started after Catholic Emancipation in 1829. After the horror of the Famine, the Catholic church set about removing all 'pagan' and 'immoral' practices on the island, and instituted a very unpleasant kind of Catholic Calvinism (reinforced by the reactionary pietist policies of Pius IX) of which everyone is now aware, and which is described in several Irish novels, notably Old God's Time by Sebastian Barry.

Patrick Shields wrote to historian Seaton F. Milligan in 1890 that as many as six or eight men stripped off and went in, then all openings were closed except what afforded a little ventilation. When they could suffer the heat no longer they came out and plunged into a pool of water within a yard or two of the sweat house. Naked, illiterate labouring men packed close together in a primitive, sensual practice would certainly not have been approved of by Ireland's new bourgeoisie of interfering and sexually-repressed clergy.

On the other hand, Seán Ó Céilleachair, a teacher in a Co. Leitrim National School some decades later asked his pupils to ask their parents about sweathouses. Here is part of one hearsay account, from the duchas website, where many such reports have been scanned and posted.

I have never seen a stone seat built into a sweathouse, though I have seen candle-niches.
If the Church was appalled by a group of naked men packed into a sweathouse, this account of both men and women 'taking the cure' would have caused priestly heart-attacks, and possibly retribution.

The remoteness of the ones now found may reflect a purge of them by clerics and 'pious' types, and a desire to keep them out of sight of the new oppressors..

Greesah is, interestingly, Scots-Irish for embers.

Smoke-hole eand closing-stone on top of the sweathouse at Lurgaboy, co. Roscommon.
Photo by Katie Kearns, 3016.

Could sweathouses be survivals of consciousness-improving chambers as at La Hougue-Bie and Wilmersdorf, latterly overlaid with the prophylactic function of saunas ?
Cannabis is not likely to have been used in Ireland for a millennium at least, but a much more seriously-numinous means of widening the awareness is still to be found all over the island.

Cornaguilla, county Leitrim.

There is a great deal of literature on the effect and use of various kinds of mushroom (Psilocybe spp. and Fly Agaric). The appearance of the formerly ubiquitous "magic mushroom", Psilocybe semilanceata, fits rather well with descriptions of pixies, leprechauns and other 'little green men'. A more gross mushroom-spirit is the modern Santa Claus, dressed in the colours of Fly Agaric, associated with reindeer (from whose urine the unmetabolised but detoxified active constituent was drunk bv the shamans of sub-arctic reindeer-herdsmen, who enters down a chimney and brings gifts. The entrance to many circumpolar dwellings is also the smoke-hole, as in Irish sweathouses. In our culture of acquisition the gifts are meaningless objects of desire rather than real numinous Gifts, and the shaman figure (who degenerated to Father Frost in Westernised Russia and Scandinavia) coalesced with St Nicholas, the Three Magi and the ancient gift-tradition within the Saturnalia.

Corradeverrid, county Cavan, reportedly built by a Dr Greden

If Irish sweathouses were used like the secularised hammam and sauna, why were they not built close to stone-built dwellings and their turf-stacks ? Why were they, as reported, used infrequently - mostly in the Autumn ? Were they used exclusively by one sex ? Does one report of an "itinerant bath-master" indicate a psycho-therapeutic use supervised by a travelling doctor-shaman or Wise Man ? And why, in a country which, until the use of chemical fertlisers, was in October and November (the time of The Gap of the Year, Samhain, Hallowe'en) carpeted with Psilocybe semilanceata, also known as Liberty Caps, is there no record of their use ? These mushrooms are still plentiful on marginal land and on the edges of chemically 'fertilised' agricultural land. But there is a pattern of "collective forgetting" of mind-expanding plants and their extracts by cultures which inevitably adopt manufactured mind-numbing drugs such as alcohol. Thus the identity of Soma was lost, and only inactive "substitutes" were identified.

It seems unlikely (though not impossible) that Psilocybe mushrooms - probably as an infusion, maybe with other herbs - were not consumed up to the time of the Famine - but of course the agonising and protracted trauma of the hungry years and the halving of the population by death and emigration affected Irish behaviour and attitudes to Wild Food or "famine food" - as nutritious nettles, rose-hips, elderberries and so on are still considered. After the Famine, only grocery-store victuals were eaten. Even now, eating blackberries is far from universal in Ireland: those who pick them tend to be English, other foreigners, or local children paid (a penny a pound, as I remember in the 1960s) to gather them.

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Tullynahaia, county Leitrim

For the decline of Irish traditions right across the spectrum, the Famine was Pelion piled upon the Ossa of Catholic Emancipation of 1829. This resulted in the rapid application to Ireland of a very urban-English Victorian-puritan 'respectability' that ran counter to many of the old ways and practices which had survived until the Penal days - practices which were bowdlerised and Christianised when they could not be suppressed. Ireland became for the first time - and remained until the end of the 20th century - a highly-conservative society which had also lost its traditions, and whose mores came from the right wing of the Catholic church. This is in contrast to Italy, for example, where all sorts of "pagan" survivals (from frog-cults and wolf-veneration to bleeding statues) can still be found in the centre and south, while sceptical atheism is almost the norm in Tuscany and the north.

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Annagh Upper (side view), county Leitrim.

So, after the Famine, few would have claimed or admitted to remember the eating of Psilocybe, which, it should be noted, were free, abundant and (through drying) available all year, and produce a state of consciousness far above that induced by alcohol – which requires a compicated process to produce, and money to otherwise obtain. The world-wide phenomenon of the replacement of natural, easily-ingested and fairly benign plants by manufactured, expensive and toxic alcohol is a sad paradigm for the take-over of the world by toxic "turbo-capitalism".

In the same way, 'pagan' practices such as painting or capping phallic stones, using cure-stones (which were promptly and cleverly dubbed curse-stones) some of which still survive, wild dancing (for which the Irish were famous) and the veneration of Fairy Thorns were discouraged.

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Cure-stones, Killinagh, county Cavan

But Psilocybe mushrooms must have been recognised and taken (probably as a tea, or even as they were collected) in Ireland (and elsewhere), since they were so plentiful (right up until recent poisoning of so much agricultural land) - yet we have (so far as I know) no record, no evidence. Humans never miss out on a source of intoxication or hallucination (from ayahuasca to glue), no matter how complicated the process of extracting it. Moreover, traditional societies 'knew their mushrooms' even better than they do today (everywhere except the British Isles). Did whiskey supplant mushrooms ? If so, why ? Every hypothesis leads to more questions !

If dark, chthonic sweathouses had a psycho-therapeutic function stretching back at least to Bronze Age times, we can be sure that they too would have been discouraged by the twin powers of Church and State. By the time that uncasual enquiries started (after the First World War) they had fallen into desuetude, and their use had been erased (like much else) from the collective memory. If they had been widespread across the island, they were destroyed by agricultural encroachment in the fertile lowlands, surviving only in the remotest districts or by sheer accident. The Church abhorred mystical or psychedelic experiences that it saw as demonic and could not control. It was much happier with alcohol, the consumption of which was regulated in the first instance by Her Majesty's Customs and Revenue men, except in remote and 'backward' parts.

Small wonder that enquirers were fobbed off with glib explanations of autumnal prophylaxy and 'sweating out the bad' as Mrs McLoughlin of Tullynafreave expressed it. But sweating out the bad might very well have been more than a figure of speech in a desperately poor region in a poor country where every new mouth to fill was a curse, and one too many could reduce a family to destitution and starvation. Mrs McLoughlin stated that only the women in her family had used the sweathouse. If only women used them, it is very possible that they were part of a procedure to induce miscarriage in unwanted pregnancies. Hot baths are a classic part of this procedure, and more effective if followed by cold ones. Ingestion of a large dose of Psilocybe mushrooms is also abortifacient. The water which is near so many sweathouses could also have been most useful for cleansing after a successful miscarriage. And finally, the distance and in some cases difficulty of access would ensure privacy and itself aid the process. The 'Itinerant Bathmaster' could well have been a Wise Man practised in the art of inducing miscarriages. Perhaps he was also a sweathouse-builder – for it would take some skill in building dry-stone walls to construct a sweathouse.

Sweating and dunking in cold water could have been a purifying prelude to the consumption of mushrooms, perhaps at home. I have gone through the reverse procedure (in the 1980s) during which I felt physically intimate with 'Nature', sitting on the ground and feeling roots growing out from my anus.

They could not have been social like Finnish saunas or Struell Wells in county Down. Nor were they 'sacred spaces'. As to their origin, a distant Viking connection is quite possible, because artefacts and traditions can hang on for hundreds of years in remote areas. Maybe Sligo in the NW, close to county Leitrim, was the chief point of entry. Saunas are and presumably always were made of wood, hence quickly rotted and forgotten, but in stony and boggy areas an adaptation could well have occurred and survived. There are descriptions in the National Folklore Collection about sweathouses with clay walls and thatch rooves. It is worth noting that the isolated group in county Louth is not far from Carlingford, a Norse settlement with a Norse name.

By the dawn of the 20th century very few - if any - people knew how sweathouses had been used, for in Ireland the rupture of handed-down knowledge, especially from mothers to daughters, occurred earlier than almost anywhere else in rural Europe. The Great Famine resulted in a collective Irish shame associated with traditional practices, the native language, and "wild food". It is curious that no accounts of them suggest an 'otherworldly' connection; no mention of the sídhe or 'good folk' as there has been been with reference to mounds or cairns and other ancient structures. This would tend to contradict the mushroom-imbibing theory.

Assaroe, county Donegal

How much arcane knowledge died in the hedges with Famine victims, or was carried across the ocean to America and deliberately forgotten there, we will never know. What we can be sure of is that there has been in Ireland a Great Disremembering (encouraged by the Church) which acted as undertaker to the Great Hunger, and may still not have run its course. And although sweathouses still lurk in secret places and leprechaun-hatted Psilocybes still grow, their use and possible connection remain as obscure to us as the mind-set of Mesolithic hunter-gathers, the cosmology of Celtic kinglets, or the ecstasy of Atlantic anchorites.

Damaged sweathouse, Eskerbawn, county Roscommon.

 

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back to part one

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[This text has been expanded from articles which previously appeared in
Archæology Ireland (volume 3 number 1, 1989) and The Ley Hunter (number 119, September 1993).]

Most of the photos in these pages are from slides taken in the 1970s.

An article on Navajo sweating-structures, with some text taken verbatim from these pages.

 

For valuable accounts of sweathouses and people who used them,
click here

 

 

View slide-show >

 

Sweathouses in county Leitrim (after Leitrim Sweathouse Project Report, 2001).
The pale green areas indicate concentrations in adjoining counties.
On the map below, the arrow points to county Leitrim.

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APPENDIX I

In a quasi-erudite essay on 'Irish Soma', Peter Lamborn Wilson (aka Hakim Bey) asked if Psilocybe and Fly Agaric (Amanita muscaria) grew in Ireland in ancient times. Of course they did - in huge numbers.

I am interested in this question because I take microdoses (1 gram) of Psilocybe twice a week to alleviate mild bipolarity, and they work marvellously well. Can Psilocybe semilanceata have escaped the attention of people in Europe (and on the Mainland to this day) who could distinguish between wholesome, tasty mushrooms such as the once-ubiquitous Agaricus campestris and similar-looking poisonous ones) and who knew very well the effects (both salutary and dangerous) of Fly Agaric ?

Sweathouses were apparently used mainly in autumn, when Psilocybe semilanceata was plentiful. Could it have been a secret part of the treatment – for example, the 'herbs' administered by the Old Woman mentioned above ?

For a couple of years I took microdoses of Psilocybe 'truffles' to alleviate depression, and they worked well - until they didn't.

The sameness of reports on sweathouses is suspiciously similar to the uniformity of other rural pseudo-myths, such as dock-leaves relieving nettle-stings, bats nesting in hair, or the definition of prehistoric tombs as Giant's Graves.

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APPENDIX II

from the Birmingham (Warwickshire) City Council's website:

Reconstruction Prehistoric Birmingham- 3000 years old burnt mound Over 30 "burnt mounds" have been found in Birmingham. These are low mounds, usually 10 to 15m across, composed of heat-shattered stone, charcoal and ash. Some of Birmingham's burnt mounds have been dated to between 1500 and 1000 BC by radiocarbon dating of the charcoal. Excavation of a burnt mound visible as a layer of burnt stones in a stream bank at Cob Lane in Bournville in 1980 and 1981 showed that it originally lay in a stream meander. Under the burnt mound, there were a burnt hollow, a timber and clay-lined pit next to the former stream bank, and many holes resulting from pointed branches being pressed into the ground. The former stream bed contained remains of beetles. The different beetle species indicate what the environment was like 3000 years ago, and included species usually found where animals are grazing. The silty clay on which the mound had accumulated is likely to be soil which had been loosened by ploughing on the slopes above the site, providing further evidence for prehistoric farming.   The burnt mound mystery - kitchen or sauna? Burnt mounds are usually interpreted as the débris from when ancient people made water boil to cook food by dropping heated stones into it. Although experiments have shown that this could have been the case, we would expect to find animal bones and other débris from food preparation and cooking. Another interpretation is that they are the debris from steam or sauna-type bathing. In North American Indian Sweat Lodges, steam is produced for bathing by pouring water over heated stones inside a tent or hut. Reconstructions based on the excavated evidence from the Cob Lane site and the structures used by North American Indians have shown that burnt mounds could well have been saunas. The reconstruction consists of a hearth on which the stones are heated and a tent on a framework of bent-over branches. The heated stones are placed in a hollow inside the tent and water ladled onto them from a clay-lined pit, to produce steam. This reconstruction replicates all the features found in the Cob Lane excavation: the shattered stones and charcoal which is the débris from the hearth, the holes resulting from the pointed branches used to make the tent, the burnt hollow which is where the hot stones are placed, and the clay-lined pit next to the former stream line. (copied July 2002) Note that 'Burnt Mounds' in Ireland are known as Fulachta Fía[dh] - and that in the above there is no reference to Irish Sweathouses.

ANCIENT IRISH BREWERIES ? from The Irish Examiner 11th August 2007 by Sarah Stack « Bronze age Irish men were as fond of their beer as their 21st century counterparts, it was claimed yesterday. Two Galway archaeologists have put forward a theory that one of the most common ancient monuments around Ireland may have been used for brewing ale. They believe that fulachta fiadh - horseshoe shaped, grass-covered mounds which were conventionally thought of as ancient cooking spots - could have been the country's earliest breweries. To prove their belief that an extensive brewing tradition existed in Ireland as far back as 2500 BC, Billy Quinn and Declan Moore recreated the process. After just three hours of hard work, and three days of waiting for their brew to ferment, the men enjoyed a pint of the fruits of their labour. Three hundred litres of water was transformed into a "very palatable" 110 litres of frothy ale. "It tasted really good," said Mr Quinn. "We were very surprised. Even a professional brewer we had working with us compared it favourably to his own. It tasted like a traditional ale, but was sweeter because there were no hops in it." Mr Quinn said it was while nursing a hangover one morning, and discussing the natural predisposition of men to seek means to alter their minds, that he came to the startling conclusion that fulachta fiadha could have been the country's earliest breweries. The two set out to investigate their theory in a journey which took them across Europe in search of further evidence. On their return they used an old wooden trough filled with water and added heated stones. After achieving an optimum temperature of 60°C to 70°C they began to add milled barley, and about 45 minutes later simply bailed the final product into fermentation vessels. They added natural wild flavourings and yeast after cooling the vessels in a bath of cold water for several hours. Tomorrow they plan to start work on a fourth batch they hope will taste as good as their first. The archaeologists, who reveal their experiment in full in next month's Archaeology Ireland, point out that while their theory is based on circumstantial and experimental evidence, they believe that, although fulachta fiadh were probably multifunctional, a primary use was for brewing beer. »

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