The icehouse at Woodlawn in County Galway is a quiet relic of that earlier system, a structure designed to hold harvested ice well into the warmer seasons and serve the needs of a substantial estate household.

Icehouses of this type were typically built partly or wholly underground, with thick walls and a domed or vaulted roof to insulate the interior. Ice was cut from frozen ponds or lakes during winter, packed in layers of straw or sawdust, and stored in the chamber below. A well-constructed icehouse could preserve ice for six months or more, long enough to supply an estate kitchen through the height of summer. The Woodlawn estate in east Galway was the seat of the Trench family, later the Barons Ashtown, and the presence of an icehouse on the grounds speaks to the scale and ambition of the household they maintained there during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.