archaeological & built heritage assessment - The Heritage Council

At the time of newly acquired wealth during the industrial revolution, a series of eighteenth century
churches, including those for Church of Ireland worship, were established throughout Ireland. Examples
of these can be found within the limits of the waterways corridor such as those in the villages of Leitrim,
Mohill and Drumsna. Children’s Burial Grounds (known as Cillín) are also numerous sites throughout
Ireland. Many of these are not associated with a church and can be scattered throughout the countryside
while some can be located on a site with early ecclesiastical associations. These alternative burial grounds
resulted mainly from refusal by church authorities to allow burial of unbaptised infants in consecrated
graveyards. This practice had continued into living memory in Ireland. These burial grounds were also
used to inter adults, notably unidentified bodies and suicides. They were also used in times of famine,
particularly in the mid 1840s. A Famine Graveyard exists on the northern outskirts of Drumshanbo while
a Children’s Burial Ground is located in the townland of Doon, Co. Roscommon, within the corridor
limits. Furthermore, there are another four recorded burial grounds located within the study area that
probably date to the medieval period.
A monument type that occurs within the study area and that is peculiar to Leitrim and south Ulster is the
sweathouse, an Irish type of sauna used for easing the symptoms of rheumatism and other related
ailments. Dating from the eighteenth century and used until the twentieth century, a sweathouse is a small
beehive chamber where the walls slope inwards until they are capped with a single stone. They have a
diameter of less than 2m with a single narrow opening, and they are seldom high enough to stand up in.
Sweathouses are usually located beside streams and built into a hillslope and the exposed stonework
covered in a sod mound, sealing the chamber. A turf fire was allowed to smoulder in the chamber, which
was then raked out when rushes, and sometimes water were introduced, while those undergoing the
treatment crouched inside, sweating. A plunge into the cold stream completed the treatment (Weir
1989). There are eleven sweat houses in total located throughout the study area – five in Co. Leitrim and
six in Co. Roscommon.
The period of intense industrial manufacture throughout Europe also affected Ireland in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries. Remnants of this era can be found within the study area in the form of bridges,
roadways, railways, manufacturing industries, navigation networks and canals.
Underwater Archaeology
Intense utilization of the River Shannon and its lakes since prehistoric times is evidenced by the
archaeological record from a land-based perspective in the form of various areas of human settlement and
also by the water-based record of archaeological features and finds (see Appendix 2). Although the
waterway contains a large amount of known archaeological sites, it is very likely that it still contains a
significant amount of potential underwater archaeology.
Evidence of Mesolithic human settlement within the waterways corridor is provided by artefactual finds
that have been discovered in a water-based context on the shores of Lough Allen, Lough Key and north
of Jamestown on the banks of the River Shannon. Similarly, both Neolithic and Bronze Age archaeological
sites are few within the corridor, however the density of artefact evidence is testimony to extensive
settlement having once existed within the study area in the past. Interestingly the majority of these finds
were retrieved from the waterway itself.
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