The Icehouse
Icehouses – buildings for storing ice – can be found all over the world, dating from the earliest times. By the mid nineteenth century, most country estates would have had at least one. Until refrigeration was generally available, people lived on seasonal fare with inevitable fluctuations in supply. Food was dried, salted, pickled in vinegar or alcohol, smoked, parboiled, potted or kept in sugar syrup. Greater variety was available only to the rich who had living supplies in the dovecote, deer-park, fishpond and rabbit warren. The wealthy supplemented that fare through the use of an icehouse, regarded as a luxury in the eighteenth century.
Ice was collected from natural or artificial freezing ponds on the estate. Efforts were made to keep the freezing pond as clean and clear as possible, sometimes posting a gamekeeper there to move twigs and scare away birds and mammals. A head gardener and writer, Charles MacIntosh describes filling an icehouse: “the ice should be broken with mallets or stampers to a coarse powder and well rammed down in the well or pit, keeping the upper surface concave and adding a little water from time to time in order to fill up the interstices and assist the congelation of the whole into a solid mass”. Icehouses continues in general use until the end of the nineteenth century. With the decline of country estates after the First World War, icehouses increasingly fell into disuse and overgrown examples were often rediscovered only by chance. The icehouse in Monivea Demesne was constructed by the Ffrench family to serve the castle. The chamber reaches several metres underground and is well insulted at the top with stone and earth, thus enabling food to be kept cool in the hottest weather. The shelter of the surrounding trees would also have helped to keep the temperature of the contents down. This might explain the distance between the icehouse and the castle, which would surely have created extra work for the castle servants. The entrance was repaired in 2000 and a grille installed for the safety of the public.