I am walking through a field of hawthorn trees with Michael Haughey. A gravedigger and sheep farmer from Carrickmore in Co Tyrone, he is one of the few people who know the location of all four of his town’s sweathouses. Haughey stops walking before my untrained eyes even see the low stone dome appear out of a hillside. It is entirely camouflaged in lichen, grass and moss. I smile at how gorgeous it is. For months I have been tracing the lines of sweathouses in texts, and following their curves across the few early photographs of them that exist, but they didn’t feel real to me until now.
There was a time, just over the cusp of living memory, when people came to this exact spot in search of relief from arthritis, rheumatism, and every other ailment you could think of, from deafness to sore eyes. With friends and family, they would light a turf fire inside the chamber of the sweathouse, waiting for the walls to absorb enough heat before letting it die and scraping out the embers. Freshly cut green rushes would have been strewn on the scorched floor, so people could crawl inside without burning themselves.
Haughey lays an old wax jacket down on the grass so my jeans don’t get wet, and politely turns away as I wriggle inside. There is no elegant way to get through the sweathouse’s narrow entrance, barely a foot off the ground. The first time Haughey entered it, in the 1990s, he found ash on the ground from the last people to use it a century earlier, around the time most sweathouses seem to have fallen out of use.
Using the torch on my phone, I scan the ground. There are hart’s tongue ferns growing in the damp soil, but any ash is long gone. I turn to the stone walls, blackened and charred red in places, evidence of the fires that once raged here and their role in storing and then releasing heat.
In the space where I am hunkered now, someone else once sat, naked and waiting. Perhaps they called for their friends to pass in a cabbage leaf to keep their heads cool, or a bucket of water and a sprig of heather to dip and sprinkle on the rushes, creating steam. Once the entrance was plugged with sods of turf or towels, the bathers, two or maybe three of them, would have been plunged into darkness, save for the chinks of light allowed in through the sweathouse’s drystone walls. Maybe they sang, or told stories, or prayed, or counted down the minutes second by second, because it was hot in there – really hot.
Modern archaeological tests have shown that sweathouses could have reached 90 degrees, a temperature even the most foolhardy today would find it hard to withstand for more than 30 minutes. When they could take the heat no more, a shout would have gone out for the entrance to be opened so the bathers could crawl out and into the arms of a loved one, there to guide them down to the nearby stream to cool off. Perhaps one round was enough, and they returned home to be swaddled in blankets and sip a cup of whey, or perhaps the heat drew them in again, and again.
Sweathouses are distinctly Irish, but from their beginning to their endings, they have been coated in mystery and lore. We don’t know when people first started building them, where they came from, or all of the ways people used them, although there are theories for every lingering question.
There are about 300 still left standing across the island of Ireland, but many people believe there were once thousands.
The first written reference we have to the sweathouses comes from Jacques-Louis de Bougrenet De La Tocnaye, a minor French aristocrat who, having fled France when the monarchy fell, decided to walk around Ireland for a year in 1796. Utilising his self-proclaimed “genius for observation”, La Tocnaye wrote a travel memoir about his perambulations across the island. Beguiled by the stories he heard of a “peculiar practice” of “sweating houses”, he visited one in Ballintra in Co Donegal, the day after it was lit, and wrote about it in A Frenchman’s Walk through Ireland, published in 1798.
This is just one snippet: “As soon as the patients enter, an abundant perspiration starts and commonly when they come out they are much thinner than when they went in. Wherever there are four or five cabins near each other there is sure to be a sweating-house, and no matter what may be the malady of the peasant, he uses this as a means of cure. The man who showed me the one I examined had been in it the day before for sore eyes.”
No two sweathouses are the same; each is distinctive, but they do share common features. Typically they are found in secluded, peripheral places, near a stream or a brook, and they are circular, built 1½ to two metres high, and the same across. They were largely communal places, not exclusive or elitist, but open for those who needed deep heat and the healing it can bring to a body.
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They were part of a group effort to keep the community well, as people gave up time, energy and resources to protect others. There are stories of talented healers using the sweathouses to cure every ailment that could afflict a population with little access to healthcare. There was a famous family of bloodletters, the Lynches in Shancurry, Co Leitrim, who used the sweathouse to break a fever, and a widely respected folk healer, Martha Douglas, who was said to sweat patients in her parish of Clogher in Co Donegal for “12-24 hours” before giving them a concoction of herbs. “After three or four days the patient was completely cured. Old Martha never told the secret of her cures, which died with her.”
These stories were recorded by schoolchildren in the late 1930s (available to search on dúchas.ie) when sweathouses were still within the living memory of the elderly. They reveal how the “sweating cure” was something people put deep faith in in Ireland, and still do, but they also show, as in the case of Martha Douglas, how easily the secrets of the sweathouse – the teach allais – could slip away within just a few generations.
Irish sweathouses are part of a global culture of sweat-bathing, of which there is no origin point, no moment of conception. The first written reference comes in 440 BC, when a band of fearsome Scythian horsemen, living in modern-day Crimea, used sweat-baths and cannabis seeds to purify themselves after burying their dead. Their rituals were immortalised by the Greek historian Herodotus, who was there to witness how “The Scythians howl, awed and elated by the vapour. This takes the place of a bath for them, since they do not use any water at all to wash their bodies.” But the practice is far more ancient than the written word. And although we may think of countries such as Russia, Finland, Central America and Japan as having these rich and ancient traditions, one of the oldest sweat-lodge sites ever discovered was in Ireland.
“Rathpatrick was what you’d call a scruffy piece of land,” says James Eogan, a senior archaeologist with Transport Infrastructure Ireland. “Outside of Kilkenny, sandwiched between a petrol station, a road and a distribution centre, it was not at all the kind of place you’d envisage finding a sauna or anything much else, to be honest.” But it was here in the summer of 2003 that archaeologists discovered something that had long been hypothesised in Ireland, but never before discovered: a 3,000-year-old Bronze Age sweat lodge.
These structures are different from sweathouses, from how they look to how they are heated. Put simply, what archaeologists found was a hearth where stones would have been heated in fire, a shallow trough perfect for filling with water to cool down in, and evidence of a five-metre-wide circular tent, supported by hazel rods. The hot stones would have been taken from the fire and laid in the centre of the sweat lodge, their glowing masses radiating heat and warming the people inside.
Why people living during the Bronze Age in Ireland would have built a sweat lodge, we can’t know for certain. There is evidence that the population at this time suffered from arthritis and rheumatism, the same painful conditions their descendants would seek relief from in sweathouses several millennia later. But there are also clues in the very specific location these people chose. The Rathpatrick sweat lodge was built alongside a river, a natural boundary, indicating perhaps that it was used as a place for different communities to gather.
But its location may have been chosen for another reason. Overlooked by an earlier Bronze Age burial site, “it is not unreasonable,” as Eogan says, “to think that the communities that lived there would have preserved a folk memory that this is where the ancestors were. So the sweat lodge wasn’t just for going in and opening up pores, but it was for going in and opening up spiritual pores. This land could have been seen as a sacred place, for the living and the passing between.” Other Bronze and Iron Age sweat lodge sites have since been discovered at Rathin in Co Meath, and possibly at Cookstown, Co Meath, at Ballykeoghan, Co Kilkenny, and one in Scartbarry, near Fermoy in Co Cork.
Knowledge of these wooden sweat lodges and the stone sweathouses, their eventual successors, brings a certainty that a craving for deep and powerful heat is part of our inheritance as people of this island. It is not hard to believe that the popularity of saunas over the past few years, and the ease with which people of all ages have adopted it in Ireland, is a reawakening of something deeply familiar and instinctive inside us. It may have lain dormant for a few centuries or longer, dipping beneath the surface, and while it cannot claim to be “unbroken”, like some Nordic traditions, it was always there.
Looking for links to connect with Ireland’s own ancient sweating past, I have travelled through Europe, to Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Denmark and Sweden, experiencing sweat-bathing cultures which have passed from generation to generation, and where centuries of practices and meaning are layered on top of each other. I started to speak a new language, the language of löyly, meaning both soul and the steam that rises from kiuas, the Finnish sauna stove. I switched off my rational mind and felt how, in the heat and in the darkness, linear time ceases to matter.
I heard about the laumé, spirits of the Lithuanian style of sauna called Pirtis, and I came to believe in them because one muddy day, when the rain was soft and my mood was low, I met a blue-eyed laumé named Birutė, who changed my life.
Along the way I met sauna shamans who would never call themselves shamans; activists who believe in sauna as a human right, and of course, sauna hype beasts and sadists, only satisfied when the heat is too extreme for everyone but themselves.
In these cultures and others where sweat-bathing has survived against oppression and modern invention, it carries with it a much deeper meaning than the pursuit of feeling hot and then cold, and the equilibrium it can bring. It is the place where the four elements of earth, air, fire and water combine to produce something intangible.
It was perhaps this connection to the natural world that was missing during the 20th century in Ireland, when saunas were built inside swimming pool halls, in gyms and spas, but where they tended to be unloved corners. It wasn’t until sweat-bathing was brought back outside to shorelines and riverbanks that most of us felt the irresistible pull to the deep heat.
There are now more than 130 outdoor saunas operating in Ireland, and more are on the way. The community is diverse, with fascinating and passionate people setting up saunas, bringing groups together in sweat.
But when the lines of this modern revolution are traced back, they lead to just one person: Shirley Fitzpatrick. She is known as the “Godmother of Irish sauna”, a title she is mortified by, and she had never been inside a mobile sauna when she decided to build one in 2010. She had a feeling it was the right thing to do, so she began.
“I had a few pictures from a sauna festival in Finland and a book to guide me, but that was it,” says Fitzpatrick as we sit inside her big green van in Wicklow. It took 18 months, but the result was Bosca Beatha, her sauna, an underground secret passed between friends. It had no online presence, no marketing, and her booking system consisted of telling people to come back in three hours, or five, whenever she had space. “People didn’t care,” she says. “They went for a hike, or a pint, or just sat and drank tea. It was most people’s first experience of getting out of the sauna and going to the sea, and it was quite transformational.”
In the years since, many of her most devoted customers have gone on to set up their own saunas across the country. Liam Irwin and Daniel O’Connor, two of the cofounders of The Hot Box sauna, which is now one of the biggest operators in the country, used to drive down to Bosca Beatha at every opportunity to sweat and splash in the river, and they say it was where their business was born. Every sauna inspires another.
As Fitzpatrick says, “There are many different reasons why people are drawn to it. There are the extremes of hot and cold that people get addicted to, but there is something else too. So many people are numb now. They are not in tune with their own body. They live only in their heads. The sauna gives a chance to just be in our bodies. It is a place where mind, body and soul’s needs are met effortlessly.”
Our sweat-bathing heritage is one of healing, of gathering, of nature. It stretches back 3,000 years, when people came together to sweat, without knowing any long-term health benefits or understanding what was happening to their bodies in the extreme heat. But perhaps they didn’t need to know, it was enough to feel. The sweathouses, which so easily captured my heart as I traipsed through muddy fields and forest tracks searching for their secrets, give us a path back to a time when people came together as a community, when someone was in need.
As sauna operators around Ireland now light their stoves each morning, preparing for the day’s bathers to come, they are part of a new tradition. It is one that inherently honours the past, but can look beyond it too, weaving together different cultures, different practices, different wisdoms from around the world into our own, so once again we can feel the deepest benefits of heat and steam.
Five sauna experiences to try around Ireland
Yurt sauna at Tigh’N Alluis
Glencullen, Co Dublin. tighnalluis.ie
At the foot of the Dublin and Wicklow mountains, beside a goat willow tree, there is a circular yurt sauna that gives a different kind of heat to any barrel sauna. It is softer, rounder, and it creeps up on you in the dark. Lit only by candlelight, this is not a social sauna, but a quiet one where it’s difficult to see even the person beside you. There are cold showers here, but the real star is the natural spring pond, with a smattering of lily pads and a perfect view of the Great Sugar Loaf in the distance.
Full moon at Driftwood
Spiddal, Co Galway driftwoodsauna.ie
Watch the full moon rise directly between the two saunas at Driftwood and over Spiddal Pier, tucked away in a secluded spot on the shoreline of the Atlantic Ocean. The monthly full-moon sessions here are a beautiful way to welcome in a new phase of the lunar cycle, by swimming in the salt and sweating out the old. The point of this session is to relax, take it easy, sweat, drink hot chocolate and sit by the glow of the fire all night long.
Pirtis at Bosca Beatha
Glenmalure, Co Wicklow and Glengarriff, Co Cork boscabeatha.ie
Experience the Lithuanian style of sauna, Pirtis, at this cosy, witchy sauna by the river in Glenmalure in Co Wicklow or by the sea in Glengarriff, Co Cork, depending on the season. A guided pirtis session usually lasts a few hours and is known as “sauna for the senses”. Using fresh herbs, salts, honey and bundles of leaves known as whisks, a bathmaster will guide you through the session. Pirtis is about bringing the forest inside the sauna and using plenty of steam. After this, you’ll wonder why every session doesn’t include plants.
Slow Burn At The Barrel
Dundrum, Co Dublin thebarrelsauna.ie/dundrum
A very well-kept secret, until now. The Barrel sauna does a 90-minute-long session called Slow Burn. Once you experience this, anything shorter feels like an express. It’s self-guided, and it’s totally up to you how many times you want to go in and out of the sauna, or the cold plunges, or if you just want to sit a while on some cushions, smelling some soft incense and admiring the Goddess murals that make this spot so distinctive.
Sauna singing ceremony at Lakeside Sauna
Various locations on Lough Derg, Co Tipperary and Co Clare @lakeside.sauna on Instagram
Beginning in silence and moving into a guided meditation, the sauna singing ceremony at Lakeside Sauna is a chance to slow down – all the way down. After a round of steam and salt scrubs, the focus turns just to the breath with some humming to activate the parasympathetic nervous system, before moving into song. The singing is not a performance, but a way to connect and tap into your internal world. Afterwards, lie your steaming body on the cold grass by the lake and just listen to the birds.
Sweat House: The New and The Ancient Irish Sauna Tradition by Rosanna Cooney is published by Irelandia Press
