The structure in question is known from a single source: the mid-seventeenth century Pictorial Map of Galway, an extraordinarily detailed bird's-eye illustration of the city that records streets, buildings, and features long since vanished. In the map's index, known as the Elenchus, the structure is listed under the Latin phrase 'Collumbarium antiquum in australi parte urbis', meaning the old dovecote in the southern part of the city. That is the entirety of the documentary record.

Dovecotes, or columbaria, were once a mark of status and practical necessity. Only certain landowners held the right to keep doves, and the birds provided a reliable source of fresh meat and eggs through winter, as well as dung used to fertilise gardens. The use of the word 'antiquum', meaning old or ancient, in the map's index suggests that even by the mid-seventeenth century, when the Pictorial Map was compiled, this particular structure was already considered a relic of an earlier era. No other map of Galway records it. No other document names it. The Pictorial Map reference stands entirely alone, which makes the dovecote less a building than a placeholder, marking the approximate site of something that was already receding from memory when someone thought to write it down.