Dovecotes were structures built to house pigeons kept as a source of fresh meat and eggs, particularly useful through winter months when other food sources were scarce. That one existed here, inside a bawn, the walled enclosure typically attached to an Irish tower house or castle as a secure yard for livestock and domestic activity, gives a glimpse of the domestic scale of life within what was otherwise a military and administrative centre.

The site is recorded as Black Castle, also known as Desmond Castle, and it occupied elevated ground above the Camoge River in what is now Knockainy West. By the time the Desmond Survey was carried out in 1586, the castle was already described as ruinous within, retaining only its stone walls. The survey recorded the bawn, rendered phonetically in the document as a "Balne," as a large area or enclosure surrounded by a stony wall, with the dovecote situated within its precincts. Both the wall and the dovecote were noted, even then, as being in great decay. The broader landscape around the castle carried its own significance: the 1657 Down Survey map, held at the National Library of Ireland as MS 718, shows the Town Green of the Manor of Aney, the older name for Knockainey, positioned in the field immediately to the west of the Black Castle.

There is nothing to see at this site in any conventional sense. No masonry protrudes, no outline is legible from ground level, and the remains are understood to survive, if at all, as subsurface archaeology beneath agricultural land. The value of visiting, for anyone who does make their way to this part of County Limerick, lies less in what is visible and more in the layering of the record itself, a 1586 survey describing decay, a 1657 map plotting a town green, and a modern archaeological register holding both together. The Camoge River still runs nearby, and the elevated ground that once made this a sensible place to build remains easy enough to read in the topography.