It is a dovecote, a structure purpose-built to house doves or pigeons, which were kept as a reliable source of fresh meat and eggs, particularly through winter months when other food was scarce. In the medieval and early modern periods, the right to keep a dovecote was generally a privilege of the landed classes, which places this modest-looking structure within a particular social and economic world, even if it now sits quietly in an unremarkable patch of Tipperary farmland.

The building is circular, with an internal diameter of just under three metres, and its walls of roughly coursed limestone rubble are a substantial 1.25 metres thick. The roof is corbelled, meaning it is constructed by successive courses of stone, each projecting slightly inward until they meet at the top, a technique that requires no timber and can endure for centuries. A central circular opening at the apex, formed from well-cut dressed stone, would have allowed the birds to come and go. The doorway, at just over a metre high, is notably low, and the stonework here is revealing: both the jamb and the lintel are re-used pieces, one a dressed jamb with punch-tooling and drafted margins, the other a sill or lintel salvaged from a single-light window. Whoever built or modified the dovecote was working with material to hand, likely taken from a nearby structure. The interior once contained rows of small nesting boxes formed from horizontal and vertical slabs, most of them now broken; the best-preserved examples survive in the north-west, south-south-west, and above the doorway. Kiltinan Castle lies roughly 200 metres to the north-east, and the dovecote would almost certainly have served whoever held that estate.