It is tentatively identified as a dovecote, a tower purpose-built to house domesticated pigeons, which in medieval Ireland were kept as a reliable source of fresh meat and eggs, and whose dung was valued as fertiliser. What makes the site unusual is not simply its age but how thoroughly it had vanished. By the time John Rocque surveyed Kilkenny in 1758, the structure had already been gone long enough to leave no trace on his map, and it took excavation in the early 2000s, led by archaeologist Ian Doyle, to recover any physical evidence that it had stood at all.

The documentary record, read alongside the excavation findings, allows a surprisingly detailed history to be assembled. Radiocarbon dating of oak piles driven into the river silts beneath the structure to stabilise it against soft ground returned a date range of AD 1163 to 1278, placing the original construction firmly in the medieval period. A fragment of 13th to 14th-century pottery from the same silts supports this chronology. By 1375 a dovecote in a great park opposite the castle gate was formally noted, and in 1391 to 1393 dove-cots at Kilkenny Castle featured in a property transfer from Hugh le Despenser to James Butler, third earl of Ormond. The Butlers, as earls and later dukes of Ormond, were the dominant power in Kilkenny for centuries, and the dovecote appears repeatedly in connection with their estate. A 1537 document, recording the verdict of the commoners of the town, lists among the castle's appurtenances a garden at Saint John's and a culverhouse, the contemporary term for a dovecote, in the meadows on the north bank of the Nore. A 1546 inquisition of James Butler, earl of Ormond, records simply one pigeon house as part of the Manor of Kilkenny. The meadow's identity is confirmed by a 1684 deed in which the Duke of Ormonde, endowing Kilkenny College, conveys the adjoining ground then commonly known as Pigeon-house meadow. Within the structure itself, a fragment of early German stoneware suggested that a mortar floor surface was still in use as late as the 15th or 16th century, after which the remains were sealed beneath a deposit of mortar, rubble, and river alluvium. The building had almost certainly been demolished before the 17th century closed.