Enniscrone Seaweed Baths
A seaweed bath is a natural relaxing experience with numerous therapeutic benefits due to its high mineral content. Hot Sea Water, Seaweed and Steam Health Baths. As the name suggests, the seaweed bath is a bath full of hot sea water with seaweed added. To confine the answer to factual description is to do a great injustice to what it is. To thousands of people who enjoy a seaweed bath, this is the ultimate bathing experience. Seaweed has a high concentration of vitamins A, B, C and E and contains Iodine, which is essential for the body's metabolism. Healthy and relaxing all at the same time.
Imagine that you are immersed in an enormous bath, luxuriating in expensive bath oils. As you relax, you experience weightlessness. You are floating in a tranquil amber tinted sea of unashamed luxury.
At Enniscrone Seaweed Baths, you are enjoying the unique experience that is a Seaweed Bath. The silky oils are those extracted from seaweed by a simple process, nothing is added, nothing is taken away, simply natures best . The water in your bath is seawater pumped in from the unpolluted sea waters of the Atlantic that lap in the shore just a stones throw away from your bathroom.
Where kelp is at hand
A century-old bathhouse is doing a roaring trade in affordable spa treatments, writes Nick Fisher.
If I turn my head to one side, I find I can actually breathe through the seaweed. And as I inhale, hot fleshy fronds fall into my mouth. At first I was wary of them. Now, I've started to nibble the fronds. In fact, I can't resist them: they taste and feel like salty pencil rubbers with an inner layer of softened fingernail. Bizarrely delicious. With a warm, complex smell, like damp dog and hops.
Hot seaweed is piled over my body and my head, and through the steamy haze I can just make out the figure of my middle son, Rex, who's 15. He looks like a Dalek. His body is encased in a plywood box. His head protrudes through a hole in the top, and great white clouds of fresh seawater steam-curl from the box and around his neck, like a frilly collar. His eyes are glazed. He looks like he's on drugs.
We are sharing a cubicle at Kilcullen's Seaweed Baths on the edge of Enniscrone beach in County Sligo, north-west Ireland. I'm in a huge, ancient, cast-iron bath with crackled cream enamel, and I've decided to float on my back in the green water, piling mounds of luscious fleshy seaweed all over me. I float easily in this salty hot water and, as I close my eyes and breathe through the steamy fronds, I, too, feel like I'm on drugs. "Sure, there's no time limit," a red-haired, freckle-faced teenager had told us as she showed Rex and me to our bedsit-size cubicle. "If the bathwater comes cold, there's plenty more hot in the tap."
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She then showed us a wooden lever inside the box that, if pushed, would gush Industrial Revolution-size clouds of seawater steam into the cabinet. She suggested we take it in turns: one in the bath, one in the steam box, until we were both perfectly blanched. Then, she suggested, we should scoop the seaweed out of the bath, pile it into the bucket provided, let out our bathwater, and take it in turns to stand under a fireman's-hose-like shower of fresh cold seawater.
Lying in the bath, I can feel a warm mucous slime beginning to cling to my skin. It's womb-like. Soft and velvety. Sensual. People with skin conditions such as eczema and dermatitis, as well as sportsmen and women, love these baths. Many of the local pensioners have season tickets ("To warm their old bones in the winters") and I'm told it is a very popular hangover cure. After the hot silky seaweed soak, the stinging, cleansing pins-and-needles of the cold seawater shower leaves a bather feeling newly minted.
The baths are housed in a structure built in 1912, with flat roofs to hold the huge reservoirs that are filled twice a day with seawater pumped from Enniscrone bay. Standing outside, Rex and I lick honeycomb-flavoured ice-creams and stare across the large, billiard-table-flat sandy beach towards the US. There's no land between us and New York.
Read more: http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/travel/where-kelp-is-at-hand-20130124-2d8gq.html#ixzz2KLHFaSwN
Kilcullens Seaweed Baths
Cliff Road
Enniscrone, Co Sligo
Telephone:
353 (0) 96 36238
Pat Kenny speaks with Senator Marie Louise O'Donnell about her visit to the Enniscrone seaweed baths. Download the podcast >here<...
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