Leixlip Castle, Leixlip, Co. Kildare

It is a dovecote, built to house pigeons, and its raised first-floor entrance, complete with pigeon holes cut into the replacement timber door, is a reminder that these birds were once kept for food and were valuable enough to warrant a controlled, elevated entrance out of reach of ground-level predators.

The building dates to around 1780, placing it within the expansion of the Leixlip demesne in the late eighteenth century, when landed estates aimed for a degree of self-sufficiency that extended well beyond the main house. Dovecotes were part of that wider domestic economy, supplying meat and eggs year-round at a time when fresh protein was otherwise scarce in winter months. This example is built of rubble stone, an economical and traditional method also used elsewhere in the demesne, and rises as a single bay over a raised base, gable-fronted, with a carriageway passing through the ground floor. Ordnance Survey mapping from 1939 indicates that it was originally one of a pair; its companion has since been lost, leaving this building as the sole survivor of what was once a matched arrangement within the estate grounds.

The structure has been altered over time without losing its essential form: it was reroofed around 1950, now under corrugated iron with iron ridge tiles in place of whatever originally covered it, and renovated again around 1990, when the timber door to the first floor, with its pigeon holes, was replaced. The ground floor retains a timber lintel over its carriageway opening and red brick dressings, while an oval window with a red brick surround lights the first floor from the south-west. The stone steps leading to the upper door, with their own rubble stone retaining wall, remain in place, allowing the building's original function, however disused now, to still be read clearly in its fabric.