The structure began life as a defensive feature and ended up housing pigeons. That quiet conversion, probably carried out in the late eighteenth century, is what makes it worth pausing over.

The turret stands within the bawn of Foulksrath Castle, a bawn being the enclosed defensive courtyard, typically walled, that surrounded an Irish tower house and provided protection for livestock and inhabitants alike. The circular turret occupies the north-east angle of this enclosure, with an internal diameter of 4.35 metres, walls just over a metre thick, and a standing height of 3.8 metres. A doorway faces south-west, flanked by two windows, though all of these features have been reconstructed. As a defensive corner turret, it would originally have risen considerably higher, giving defenders a commanding line of sight along the bawn walls. At some point, most likely during the late 1700s, the structure was reduced or adapted and given its present corbelled roof, a technique in which stones are laid in overlapping rings to form a self-supporting cone without the need for timber or mortar centring. Niches for nesting birds would have been built into the interior walls, turning a redundant military feature into a practical source of fresh meat and eggs for the castle household.

Dovecotes of this kind were a mark of social standing as much as agricultural utility, since the right to keep pigeons was historically restricted to landowners of a certain status. The reuse of an older defensive structure for this purpose was not uncommon in Ireland, where the fabric of earlier centuries was often quietly pressed into new service rather than demolished.