Mosstown House, Keenagh, Co. Longford

Every opening, the oculi at the top, the round-headed apertures below, the square-headed ones nearer the ground, is blind, a rendered suggestion of a window rather than the thing itself. It is an odd sensation, looking up at a building so clearly designed to be looked at rather than looked out from, and odder still to learn that its original purpose had nothing to do with people at all. This was a pigeon house, built to hold birds, and built with a Georgian formality that seems almost wasted on its function.

Dovecotes of this kind were a practical fixture of Irish country demesnes through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, providing a steady supply of eggs and meat long before the winter larder could be trusted to do the same. What makes this one exceptional is the care taken over its appearance. Its blind openings are arranged to suggest a piano nobile, the principal storey of a grand house, raised over a basement, a bit of architectural theatre for a building that housed birds rather than people. It was probably also built as an eye-catcher, a structure placed to draw the eye and complete the view from the main house across the demesne. That main house was Mosstown House, seat of Viscount Newcomen in the late seventeenth century and later home to the Kingston family, with Alexander Kingston recorded there by 1791; the estate passed by inheritance to the Murray family around 1914. Mosstown House itself was demolished around 1962, leaving this dovecote as one of the few structures still standing from the demesne that once surrounded it. The domed brick ceiling on the ground floor is worth noting too; its form and construction closely resemble those found in icehouses of the period, raising the possibility that the building served a second, more practical purpose in its lower storey even as its upper floors performed for the view. Dovecotes of this scale and sophistication grew unfashionable by the early nineteenth century and few survive anywhere in the country, which makes this one, disused and roofless of function but still roofed in slate, a rare and slightly theatrical remnant of a vanished estate.