Visiting a magical Sanctuary in the Cotswolds for those fleeing war and torture
Today, I had the pleasure of visiting this magical place and being shown around the house & gardens. We talked about the possibility of offering massage therapy to the volunteers, workers and residents.
Caroline does the most incredible work here offering sanctuary breaks for people fleeing war and torture.
If you’re interested in staying here, volunteering or knowing more about what they do and would like to support them, please follow the link.
https://www.sanctuaryhillhouse.co.uk/
The Oldest Women’s Room in the World
Before spas.
Before biohacking.
Before wellness became a commodity.
There was the sauna.
And for centuries across Northern and Eastern Europe, it belonged — in many ways — to women.
A Sacred Room in
Finland
In Finland, the sauna has long been considered the most sacred room in the home. It was not simply a place to wash. It was a place of thresholds.
Women gave birth there. The warmth and steam created the cleanest, safest space available before modern medicine. Elder women acted as midwives. Babies took their first breaths in the soft heat of wood and stone.
The sauna was also where the dead were washed and prepared for burial.
Life entered there. Life departed there.
In Finnish folklore, the sauna was watched over by a spirit known as the saunatonttu — a small guardian being who demanded quiet respect. No shouting. No arguing. No cruelty. The sauna was not just heated — it was held.
Anthropologists often describe it as a liminal space: a room between worlds. Women, especially, moved through its thresholds — maiden to mother, mother to elder — within its walls.
The Smoke Sauna Sisterhood of
Estonia
In southern Estonia, the smoke sauna (savusaun) tradition remains one of the most intimate communal practices still alive today. Recognised by UNESCO as part of the Võromaa smoke sauna tradition, it has historically been a place where women gather away from the demands of public life.
In the deep, dark heat of a smoke sauna, women sing ancient runic songs. They whisk each other gently with birch branches. They speak aloud what cannot be spoken elsewhere — grief, longing, shame, love.
The 2023 documentary Smoke Sauna Sisterhood offers a rare window into this world. Women sit together in silence, then in tears, then in laughter. Steam rises. Stories soften. Bodies are witnessed without performance.
The sauna becomes less about heat and more about honesty.
The Banya in
Russia
In Russian folklore, the bathhouse — the banya — was also a powerful female space. Brides were ritually cleansed there before marriage. Fertility rites were performed. Herbs were infused into steam for protection and beauty.
The bathhouse spirit, known as Bannik, could be mischievous or even dangerous if disrespected. As in Finland, the space required reverence.
Importantly, the banya often offered women a rare place outside patriarchal oversight — somewhere to speak freely, to share advice, to pass down embodied knowledge.
A Room for What Cannot Be Rushed
Across these cultures, certain patterns repeat:
Sauna as womb-space
Sauna as postpartum recovery room
Sauna as menstrual rest space
Sauna as pre-marriage ritual
Sauna as grief chamber
Sauna as women’s council
Heat alters consciousness gently. Steam slows the nervous system. The darkness reduces self-consciousness. Without mirrors or screens, something ancient returns: listening.
This was never about luxury.
It was about community regulation.
About resilience.
About being witnessed.
In modern life, women rarely have spaces that are both intimate and communal. Spaces that are small enough for honesty, but structured enough for safety.
Traditionally, sauna gatherings were not loud social events. They were small. Cyclical. Seasonal. Often led by elder women. They followed rhythms of birth, harvest, grief, and renewal.
To create women-only sauna gatherings today is not inventing something new. It is remembering something old.
When a small group of women sit together in warmth — without phones, without roles, without performance — we are stepping into a lineage that stretches back centuries.
A room of heat.
A room of stories.
A room where the body is not fixed, but heard.
And perhaps, the oldest women’s room in the world still has something to teach us.
Historical & Cultural References
Finnish sauna traditions and folklore surrounding the saunatonttu (Finnish folklore archives; Finnish Literature Society)
UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage listing: Võromaa smoke sauna tradition, Estonia
Smoke Sauna Sisterhood (dir. Anna Hints)
Russian bathhouse folklore and the figure of Bannik (Slavic folklore studies)
Ethnographic research on sauna as a liminal ritual space in Nordic and Baltic cultures
🔥 Sauna culture isn’t just about sweating.
It’s about how we gather.
I’m not dreaming about putting a wooden box in a garden just to call it a business. I’m dreaming about building something slower than that. Something rooted.
In places like Finland and Estonia, sauna has always been more than heat. It’s where women gathered. Where life changes were celebrated. Where silence isn’t awkward. Where you could speak honestly, be heard and not fixed.
Heat warms & softens the body. It also softens conversation.
It slows the nervous system, brings us back into ourselves.
Sauna culture invites pauses, ritual, community.
So when I talk about building this project, I’m not just talking about a sauna.
I’m talking about building a way of gathering & resting. A way of being together that feels deeply human in a modern online world.
✨It turns out March is already incredibly busy.
I have assignments and case studies to work on. It’s all incredibly exciting and interesting and equally exhausting.
What is fun is getting to fantasise and design the vision of building a treatment pod and micro sauna for our community.
I should be studying a 6 hour long module right now but I’ve had to pause and dip out for some of the fun side of business and acknowledge when I’ve reached my limits.
You’ve got to give yourself permission to rest when you’re on the brink.
So enjoy this vision with me. I’m so far through part of my holistic massage course, the intensive practical part of my course is complete. Case studies have already begun this week and I have 2 assignments and 2 exams to work towards over the next few months.
I have a Digital Marketing course presentation to give in the next two weeks which is entirely based around setting up my business as well as a local fundraising event on the 22nd March. Really hope to see some of you there. If you’re interested in signing up to be on the waiting list for treatment when I qualify or want to hear about events and offers please visit my website and fill in the contact form.
Let’s dream together and make things happen ✨
Rooted Restoration Pod 