Overview
Visit a popular Edinburgh landmark – a dovecot of the 1500s, set in a pleasant leafy suburb.
Corstorphine Dovecot was built as part of the Corstorphine Castle estate. Dovecots, or doocots, were an important element of a landed estate. They housed pigeons in rows of nestboxes and the young birds, called squabs, were an important and reliable source of fresh meat.
Dovecots were also status buildings often designed as an eye-catching feature of the landscape around a great house.
Corstorphine Dovecot is a fairly typical dovecot of this period, in an excellent state of repair.
