These purpose-built pigeon houses, which supplied fresh meat and eggs through the winter months when other food sources were thin, were associated with landed estates across medieval and early modern Ireland. At Rathurd in County Limerick, one such pigeon-house is documented in a sixteenth-century survey, yet nobody has since been able to say precisely where it stood.

The earliest clear reference comes from a 1583 description, quoted by the antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp in a paper published in 1906 and 1907, which records that James Browne held the castle of Rathwerde, noting it was well repaired, equipped with an iron door, a bawn (a walled defensive enclosure surrounding the main tower), a pigeon-house, and other buildings. Six years later, in 1589, the castle passed by grant to one Robert Anstey. The Down Survey map of the parish of St Michaels and St Nicholas, held in the National Library of Ireland as MS. 718, depicts the castle as a two-storey house with a gable-ended chimney stack, and the accompanying written terrier, the descriptive record that went alongside such maps, noted simply that there stood a castle with an orchard on North Rathurd. The Irish place-name, Ráth Shiuird, suggests an earlier ringfort origin on the site, though by the sixteenth century it had become a recognisably plantation-era tower house complex.

For anyone with an interest in following up, the site sits in the broader landscape of County Limerick, but a visitor should go in with realistic expectations. The precise location of the dovecote within the vicinity of Rathurd Castle has not been identified, and it may no longer survive in any physical form. What remains is the paper trail: the Westropp reference, the Down Survey map at the National Library, and a single line in a terrier describing a castle and its orchard, which together sketch the outline of a small sixteenth-century estate that once kept pigeons through the Irish winter.