It is an icehouse, a structure that would once have stored blocks of ice cut during winter for use through the warmer months, typically serving a large estate kitchen or dairy. What makes this one quietly arresting is how completely the bog appears to have claimed it, the walls rising unevenly from the saturated ground as though the building is slowly being absorbed rather than simply abandoned.

The structure measures approximately ten metres along its northeast to southwest axis and five metres across. The northwest wall stands noticeably higher than the southeast one, which points to an original roof with a steep pitch, likely designed to shed the heavy rainfall typical of this part of Connemara. The doorway pierces the northeast wall, and along the external face of the northwest wall there is a line of beam slots, the sockets where timber beams were once mortared or wedged into the masonry, indicating that a lean-to structure was formerly attached to the building. What purpose that lean-to served is not recorded, though ancillary storage or a working space connected to the ice operation would be reasonable functions for such an addition. The whole structure sits in the broader landscape of the Kylemore valley, an area most visitors associate with the abbey and its walled garden rather than the agricultural and estate infrastructure that once surrounded them.

Access is genuinely difficult. When the site was last examined, the building was heavily overgrown with rhododendrons, an invasive species that has colonised large areas of the west of Ireland and which forms dense, low canopy that can make even short distances through it slow and unpleasant. Anyone wanting to see the walls up close should expect to push through considerable growth.