One solution was the icehouse, a purpose-built structure designed to store blocks of ice harvested in winter so that they could be drawn upon months later. The example at Ballinure, tucked into a south-west-facing woodland slope in the demesne of Besborough House, is a well-preserved specimen of this once-common feature of grand estate life.

The structure is built into the hillside, which would have helped insulate it naturally against rising temperatures. Its interior is circular, measuring 3.7 metres in diameter, with walls of mortared rough limestone rising to a domed roof at a height of 2.55 metres. Below floor level there was originally a pit, now infilled to ground level, where ice would have been packed tightly, often layered with straw or sawdust to slow melting. The doorway, 1.4 metres wide and facing south-west, is flanked by the remains of splayed retaining walls that once supported an earthen mound covering the structure, an additional layer of insulation that has since disappeared entirely. The exterior, composed of very rough stonework, gives little indication from the outside of the careful thermal logic that governed the building's design. Icehouses of this kind were a mark of serious domestic ambition; supplying a country house with cold storage required not just construction but an organised annual effort to cut and transport ice before it thawed.