The overgrown, circular structures are built into the hillside on the R666 Lismore-Fermoy road close to Lismore Castle.

 

Each house has a dome shaped roof, with their middle sections cone shaped. A smaller ice house also stands in Lismore’s Millennium Park, the buildings are amongst the very few ice-houses still standing from an era when many of them would have been used for storing fish that was delivered along the 23km-stretch of river from Youghal to Cappoquin and beyond.

 

They were built not to serve the nearby Castle but by a local family, the Foleys who operated a fishery business in the area and wanted to preserve their catches. On a piece of flat land, channels were dug through which water from the river would enter and then be held by sluice gates while it froze during the winter: the resultant ice was then moved into these two round buildings which seemingly continued to serve this purpose well into the last century.

 

The original entrance porch was to the rear, through which further doors gave admittance to each house, each measuring 6.65 metres in diameter and 4.5 metres to the top. They remained in use until the 1940s. Ice-houses were thought to be a status symbol for the big houses who could boast of not just of having fish out of season but of having ice for their drinks too.