Its barrel-vaulted roof, gabled walls, and a carefully proportioned doorway, just over sixty centimetres wide and one and a half metres tall, all suggest a structure that mattered to whoever commissioned it. What it actually housed was pigeons.

Dovecotes, structures purpose-built to shelter and farm domestic doves or pigeons, were a feature of larger estates from the medieval period onwards in Ireland. They provided a reliable source of fresh meat through winter months, along with eggs and dung used as fertiliser. The Cregga example sits roughly twenty metres to the south-south-east of Cregga House, which places it firmly in the orbit of that estate. The building is rectangular, almost perfectly square, measuring 3.6 metres on each external side, with an interior of around 2.2 metres by 2.2 metres. It rises to two storeys, though the upper floor is now inaccessible. That first floor retains a window in the north-west wall and, significantly, alcoves cut into the walls to serve as roosting niches for the birds, the defining feature that confirms the building's original function.