Monument record MDR13350 - Icehouse, Renishaw Park, Eckington

The ice house for Renishaw Hall is sited a quarter of a mile (400m) west of the Hall, facing north-west on the side of a wooded dell. It is built entirely of the same sandstone as the Hall. The stone is dressed and the façade is in ashlar work. A short passage, which had two doors, leads to a nearly straight-sided well with an overall depth of at least 4.7m. Some structural damage has occurred due to a tree, but Mr Sitwell intends to have the ice house repaired. Sir Osbert Sitwell, in his autobiography, said of the ice house 'Sometimes … we would only walk, in the wood called the Settings, as far as the ice-house, a strange, forbidding cave, seemingly ancient as the beehive tombs of Mycenae, to peer down its shaft full of a century's drifting of dead leaves, a place still set apart for winter even in the midst of Summer'. The ice house was visited and surveyed by R Perkins in 1984. (1, 2)