The unimproved grassland had commanding views to the south. The small wet fields, peppered with rushes and gorse, were tough going on heavy ground recently trampled by cattle.

Raised field banks, blanketed with willows and birch, obscured the sight lines I needed to find the sweat house, which according to the map, was close by.

Figuring that I needed help to find it, I retreated to the nearby road where I met a woman who suggested I call on an elderly man who lived at the top of the lane, who would know where the sweat house was.

He did, and after kindly offering to accompany me to where the sweat house was located, we set off.

As I slogged through the muddy fields, my guide skipped sprightly along the tops of the raised rushy hummocks to avoid the saturated ground. He knew how to negotiate his environment.

We chatted about the nature of the place. His name intrigued me, and I suggested that it did not originate from this part of Fermanagh. Might it be from Tyrone to the north?

“Indeed, it is,” said he. How long had he been in this part of the country? “Ach, about 500 years.” We were on a roll.

Having established his seed and breed and working on a newly shared knowledge of a long attachment to his home place, we settled into easy conversation.

Seemingly pleased with my interest in his family history, my companion identified a town in the Sperrins where he believed his ancestors came from.

Noting that there were no longer any others with his surname remaining in this part of Fermanagh, he declared that, as a bachelor, he was now the last of his name.

I was struck by the transient nature of all our comings and goings; despite the time that he and his ancestors had lived on this piece of land stretching back many generations, his was still a temporary tenancy.

After all, we mused, the land is never really ours. Whether one’s family name dies out or not, we are all just passing through, and we simply look after it for the length of time we hold it.

We came to the small stone circular sweat house, which lay under gorse and brambles close to the sound of running water.

I should have remembered earlier to look out for the tell-tale sound of a water course, as sweat houses are located close to streams, where users bathed in the water after having sweated out their ailments.

There is still a great deal about sweat houses that we don’t know.

Mainly located on poor, remote, upland areas in Fermanagh, Leitrim, Cavan, and Sligo, their dates of construction and purpose remain obscure.

Little is written about them in literature, but it is generally accepted that they were curative spaces, and that their current numbers are a mere fraction of what they were.

Made from local stone, their entrances were small creep-holes covered by cloth or a blanket to retain heat generated inside by fire.

Accommodating two or three users comfortably within its low, dark interior, the circular structure usually had a corbelled stone roof, covered with sods.

Far from towns where doctors could be called upon when illness struck, these small, enigmatic communal-built facilities held out the possibility of a self-medicated cure by sweating out a fever.

As well as a medicinal role, could they also have been used for ritual and spiritual purposes linked to the power of water?

With the erasure of pre-Famine cultural memories and folk beliefs, we may never know.

If spared destruction by future landowners, this humble and simply constructed sweat house next to a tumbling stream on a Fermanagh hillside may endure for many more years to come.

Children with different surnames will hopefully play in it, and surely pass on memories to their own children, perhaps increasing its chance of protection for future generations.