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Pigeon towers: The rise and fall of a 17th-century status symbol (2015)
During the 16th and 17th centuries, the richest people across the United Kingdom and France built beautiful towers, just for pigeons.
The answer to this question is emphatically “No.” It would be difficult to find two dovecotes quite identical in every detail, architectural style, shape, size, design of doorway, means of entrance for the inmates, number and arrangement of the nests. “It will be neither jest nor paradox to say that dovecotes were in a great measure doomed when first the turnip and the swede were introduced to British agriculture, early in the eighteenth century,” Cooke wrote. Using Cooke’s tome as a guide, Verburg, whose interest in dovecotes comes from a “synergism of style, architecture, and, yes, pigeons,” has traveled through England, France, and several other European countries in search of surviving towers.
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