The icehouse that once stood in the garden of Mallow Castle in County Cork was a good example of the type: a circular brick-lined chamber just two and a half metres across, capped with a domed brick roof and buried beneath a mound of mortared rubble limestone. Packed with ice harvested in winter, such chambers could maintain low temperatures well into summer, serving the needs of the household above. A stone-built entrance passage, nearly three metres long and less than a metre wide, led into the chamber from the north, a northward orientation being typical of the form, minimising exposure to direct sunlight and slowing the melt.

The structure sat in level pasture within the grounds of Mallow Castle, an estate with a long history in the north Cork town. The icehouse itself was relatively modest in scale, its chamber infilled to about a metre below the external ground level at the time it was recorded, though the domed roof still stood at one point seventy-five metres high. What gives this particular example a note of finality is its fate: the icehouse was removed in September 1997, ahead of a housing development on the land. It was recorded before demolition, with details published by Russell in 1996, but the structure itself is gone, surviving now only in measured description and the faint memory of a limestone mound in a Cork field.