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SP0345 : Pond by The Squires

Abbey Manor ice-house

The vanished ice-house once supplied by this pond was discussed in an article by F.W.B. Yorke Some Midland ice-houses in the Birmingham Archaeological Society Transactions vol 72 (1952) p.18-27.

Its location was given as "off the Evesham side of [the] road before reaching the entrance gate to Abbey Manor... actually on the roadside, and built 15ft below the surface of the ground. It is 10ft square by 6ft high, and the interior is reached by a straight flight of brick steps. "

When the building was examined in 1952, the entrance had been walled up - a common practice with disused ice-houses for safety's sake. A Mr A.W. Cox of Evesham is quoted as saying that the structure was then approximately 200 years old, but another local authority, E.A.B. Barnard, dated it only from 1852, the year the first railway (from Worcester) reached Evesham. "Soon after this period, ice was being conveyed... by rail ... at very low rates, and it appears that Abbey Manor was one of the households then supplied. Ice would be brought up in one of the estate wagons and deposited in the ice-house, the entrance of which faces the road. Whether or not ice was harvested from the pond after that cannot be established. It is evident, however, that these dates are contradictory. May it be assumed that this ice-house was built entirely for the purpose of housing ice imported by rail, as the date 1852 synchronises with the date of the first railway communication, and this accounts for such an odd type with its entrance so near the road?"

Over the 65 years since Mr Yorke's investigations there has been some residential development along the road known as The Squires (notably in the late 1990s) and it seems that all traces of the ice-house are now lost.