That local nickname is the most vivid thing about it, and also the most puzzling, because nothing about the structure's recorded dimensions obviously suggests a dovecote. It is a compact, near-square ruin, roughly four and a half metres on each side, with surviving walls reaching almost two metres at their highest and built to a thickness of eighty centimetres in mortared limestone. Brick appears in the western wall, hinting at later repair or modification, and the northern wall has been removed entirely, leaving the building open to the elements on one side.

The structure sits centrally within the southern half of a ringwork, a type of medieval earthwork enclosure formed by a circular or oval bank and ditch rather than the raised mound associated with a motte. Ringworks were used as defended settlements and are far less common in Ireland than in Britain, which makes their presence all the more worth noting when one is recorded. The relationship between the ruined building and the earthwork is not fully explained by what survives, but the positioning, placed deliberately inside the enclosure rather than adjacent to it, suggests the two were at some point part of the same organised use of the land. Whether the "pigeon house" name preserves a genuine memory of the building's function, or is simply the kind of label that attaches itself to old stone ruins that nobody can otherwise account for, is an open question.