Tucked into a quiet corner of the Beaulieu Estate it looks like a holiday home for a Hobbit.

But this innocent little edifice, with its proud entrance and domed brick structure, is actually a vital part of Britain’s social history. Because, in the 19th century, this was someone’s fridge.

Archaeologist James Brown explains.

“During the 1800s there was a mini iceage and the temperatures were a couple of degrees colder, so much so that a lot of fresh water sources like ponds and streams were frozen,” he says.

This, coupled with the lack of pollution, meant that ice cut from them could be stored all year to preserve food – provided you had a suitable premises.

And so was born the ice-house.

“James I built a brick one in 1619 at Greenwich Palace and there was another one constructed at Hampton Court a few years later,” says James.

The reason they caught on were as much for reasons of fashion, as preserving fresh food.

“It was always about making a show and bettering the neighbours,” says James.

“If you had the first ice house in the district you could bring all your neighbours round and impress them with unusual and amazing food, like ice-cream, for instance!”

No one knows if the Beaulieu ice-house was the first one in the New Forest but it’s certainly one of the best of the 10 recorded so far by the New Forest National Park Authority.

James shows off the interior, a beehive of extremely well-preserved bricks, going down into the ground by a good 10 feet. He points out the shelving at the bottom of the structure which would have supported a platform with a drain hole to take the melted water away.

The outside entrance has a slight dip: “You don’t want contaminants getting onto your ice,” but has been forced away from the main structure by a number of small trees and brambles growing on it which have been enthusiastically hacked away by the Beaulieu Estate, which is keen to preserve its heritage.

This ice-house has always been known about, says James, but he believes there could be double the number of ice-houses already discovered and the NFNPA are keen to find and record them as part of the development phase of a Heritage Lottery Fund project called Our Past, Our Future.

“We’ve done everything from looking at aerial photos from 1946, and in the past one of the ways we’d get to know about things like this was to get people to walk through the woods and see what they tripped over,” he says.

However, with the new Lidar mapping system – which reveals the existence of structures below vegetation – the NFNPA have been able to discover all manner of new heritage – from iron-age settlements to ice-houses.

James explains that using infra-red technology gives researchers the ability to see below the ground.

“Grass growing on top of concrete shows up differently to grass growing on top of mud,” he says.

But why should we care about these things?

After all, if we’ve done without knowing about ice-houses for so long, would it really matter if they just dwindled away?

“That idea of how we came to be where we are now resonates with people quite a lot,” says James. “It can get them to think quite differently; that there’s a little story here that makes them think about the luxuries they have which didn’t just turn up, they were a progression.”

Given that the first proper fridges only started turning up in the UK in the 1920s, he is right.

Efficient they may be, smaller and more convenient, but fridges just can’t compete with the ice-house for sheer history and interest.

And charm.

  • If you know of an ice-house in the New Forest please contact newforestnpa.gov.uk/icehouse or email archaeology@newforestnpa.gov.uk