Most Irish dovecotes, where they survive at all, tend towards the circular or rectangular, so this five-sided building at Knocknagore already sets itself apart before you even consider what it was built to do.

A dovecote was a purpose-built structure for housing domesticated pigeons, which provided both eggs and a reliable source of fresh meat, particularly valuable in winter months when other food was scarce. In Ireland, dovecotes were largely associated with landed estates and their home farms, and this one appears to have been an integrated part of the Crosshaven House farm complex. The building's five walls are of broadly similar dimensions, each around 5.6 metres in length, giving it a compact, almost formalised geometry. A lintelled doorway sits in the south-west wall, flanked by small rectangular openings set roughly 1.35 metres off the ground. Similar apertures appear in the north and east walls. Inside, a brick vault covers the ground floor, while the first floor retains nine tiers of nesting boxes, their sides built in brick and capped with stone lintels. A narrow opening in the south wall of the first floor once connected the structure directly to the attic level of adjacent farm buildings, suggesting the whole complex functioned as a tightly coordinated working unit. The building is now roofless, and its interior has not been formally accessed in recent survey work, so the full condition of those nesting boxes remains something of an open question.