What Is a Dovecote? A Building for Farming Birds

The pigeon was valued for several outputs at once and the combination is what made the investment worthwhile:

• •Squabs, meaning young birds taken from the nest at around four weeks before they fly, which are tender and were a delicacy, and which a pair produces repeatedly through the year
• •A supply of fresh meat in late winter and early spring, which was the hungry gap when no other fresh meat was available and salted provisions were running out
• •Eggs, though these mattered less than the squabs
• •Manure, which is exceptionally high in nitrogen and was valued enough to be a significant part of the return, used on gardens and hop grounds and in some regions traded
• •Saltpetre extracted from the accumulated droppings, which is a component of gunpowder and was collected under state authority in several countries
• •Feathers for bedding, and the birds themselves for sport

The requirements are specific and produce a recognisable form. The interior walls are lined with nesting boxes, called nest holes, arranged in regular tiers from near floor level to the roof, with each hole an L-shaped recess deep enough for a pair to nest out of sight, and a large dovecote may contain over a thousand. Access for the keeper to reach the upper tiers was solved by the potence, a central vertical pole carrying a rotating arm with a ladder, which sweeps the entire wall as it turns and is an elegant solution found in many surviving examples. Entry for the birds is through a louvre, lantern or small openings near the top, designed to admit pigeons while excluding larger birds. The floor is kept clear for collecting manure. The building must be secure against rats, so walls are thick and openings are placed high, and it is usually sited to catch sun and shelter. Forms include circular towers, square towers, octagons, gabled buildings and dovecotes built into the gable ends of barns.

The pigeon's diet is what made dovecotes contentious. The birds feed themselves entirely by foraging over the surrounding countryside, which means the owner obtains meat and manure at no cost in feed by consuming grain from fields belonging to other people, which is straightforwardly a transfer from tenants and smallholders to whoever owns the cote. That is why the right to keep pigeons was restricted by law in several countries, limited in England to lords of manors and to clergy, and why the arrival of a new dovecote was a recognised grievance. In France the droit de colombier was a seigneurial privilege resented sharply enough that it was among the feudal rights abolished in 1789, and the size of a cote was regulated in proportion to landholding. The estimates of how many existed are large, with tens of thousands in England and France at the peak, which implies an enormous pigeon population feeding on arable land.

Dovecotes declined through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for reasons connected to agricultural improvement. Winter feeding of livestock became possible with turnips and improved fodder crops, which removed the need for pigeon meat during the hungry gap by making fresh beef and mutton available year round. Enclosure and improved farming made the loss of grain to foraging pigeons less acceptable and more measurable. Guano imports and later synthetic fertiliser removed the value of the manure. The legal privileges were abolished. What survives is a substantial stock of buildings with no function, many listed and protected, frequently converted to other uses and frequently misidentified by their owners as follies, chapels or granaries. They remain informative to historians as an index of estate wealth and of manorial rights, and conservation bodies treat them as a distinct building type, with the potence, the nest hole pattern and the entry arrangement being the features that identify one.

A dovecote housed hundreds or thousands of pigeons as livestock, supplying tender squabs in the late winter hungry gap, nitrogen-rich manure and saltpetre for gunpowder. Interiors are lined with tiers of nest holes reached by a rotating ladder on a central pole. Because the birds fed themselves on other people's grain, the right to keep them was a legal privilege of landowners and a genuine grievance, abolished in France in 1789. Winter fodder crops and imported fertiliser ended them.