These structures, usually built into a north-facing slope or earthen bank to minimise temperature fluctuation, were filled during winter with ice cut from nearby lakes or ponds, packed tightly and insulated with straw or sawdust, and drawn upon throughout the warmer months. The icehouse at Dalystown Demesne in County Galway is one such survival, a quiet reminder of the domestic logistics that underpinned estate life.

Dalystown Demesne is the kind of place that accumulates history at its edges rather than announcing it. Icehouses of this type were typically constructed during the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, when the fashion for elaborate estate amenities reached its peak among the Anglo-Irish landowning class. They were often vaulted in brick or stone, set partly underground, and accessed through a narrow passage designed to limit the ingress of warm air. Many have survived in Ireland largely because their thick walls and subterranean position made them too solid to bother demolishing, even long after their function became obsolete.