In Irish townland nomenclature, names involving birds, particularly pigeons or doves, sometimes point to the former presence of a dovecote, a structure built by landed estates or monasteries to house domestic pigeons bred for food and fertiliser. Whether that is the origin here is not documented in surviving detail, but the name alone marks it out as a place that once had some particular function or character in the local landscape.

Shrule itself sits on the Black River near the Mayo and Galway border, and the area has a layered past. The village is perhaps best known for an episode during the 1641 rebellion, when a large number of Protestant settlers were killed at its bridge, an event that entered the historical record as one of the darker incidents of that period. The broader townland landscape around Shrule preserves various earthworks, enclosures, and features that reflect centuries of continuous settlement and land use in the west of Ireland. Pigeons Hill, as a named archaeological monument, sits within that context, though the specific nature of what survives there, whether earthwork, mound, or structural remains, has not been fully published in accessible form.