A dovecote or
dovecot is a building intended to house pigeons or doves which were
an important food source in history. In Scotland the usual term is
doocot, and the tradition is continued in modern urban areas.
Doocots may be square or circular, or even built into the end of a
house or barn and generally contain pigeonholes where the birds
nest. The birds were kept both for their eggs and flesh.
Architecture.
Their location is chosen away from large trees that can house
raptors and shielded from prevailing winds. Their construction
obeys a few safety rules: tight access doors and smooth walls with
a protruding band of stones (or other smooth surface) to prohibit
the entry of climbing predators (martens, weasels…). The
exterior facade was, if necessary, only evenly coated by a
horizontal band, in order to prevent their ascent.
Doocot materials can be very varied in shape and dimension
extremely diverse: the square dovecote with quadruple vaulting:
built before the fifteenth century were covered with curved tiles,
flat tiles, stone lauzes roofing and occasionally with a dome of
bricks. A window or skylight was the only opening.
The square doocot in the seventeenth century had flat roof tiles
and in the eighteenth century had a slate roof.
Inside, a dovecote could be virtually empty (boulins being located
in the walls from bottom to top), the interior reduced to only the
structure of a rotating ladder, or "potence", allowing the
collection of eggs or squabs and maintenance.
Early purpose-built doocots in Scotland are of a "beehive" shape,
circular in plan and tapering up to a domed roof with a circular
opening at the top. In the late 16th century they were superseded
by the lectern type, rectangular with a monopitch roof sloping
fairly steeply in a suitable direction.
Finavon Doocot, of the lectern type, is the largest doocot in
Scotland, with 2,400 nesting boxes. Doocots were built well into
the 18th century in increasingly decorative forms, then the need
for them died out though some continued to be incorporated into
farm buildings as ornamental features.