Image ID: 04906

Dovecote at Old manor Farm, Coddington

Courtesy of Antoine

Old Manor Farm
Coddington
Nottinghamshire
England

Pevsner notes that this rectangular gables brick dovecote bears some 17th century decoration. Writing of a visit to Coddington Dovecote in 1927, Whitaker (in his descriptive list of the Medieval Dovecotes of Nottinghamshire) noted the following statistics: 'The cote was eighteen feet from east to west, and twenty-four feet from north to south; the door was three feet wide and five feet high. This is often the size of the dovecotes which are near the house, and under pretty close observation, as this door was. There was one string course of two bricks thick, standing out about six inches. The walls were eighteen inches wide, the nesting holes in them were fourteen inches deep, so that the back was only one brick thick, but the walls were solid between each nest, which were about a foot apart. The entrance holes to the nesting places were five inches high by six across. At the end of some were enlarged about four inches on the right, and the same on the left in others, while here and there was only a straight end. Directly I entered the door I was much struck by seeing a partition which, after leaving a space near the door, ran across the bottom of the cote. This measured nine feet nine inches wide, with five rows of nine nesting places on either side. Never have I seen a cote with this sort of partition before. The nesting places ran from the top level of the end walls right up to the gable roof and ended in two nest places. It was most difficult to count the number of nesting places, but we did as nearly as possible, and there were about 1250 of them. The landing ledges under nest holes were five inches wide. On the south side, and about the middle of the wall, were three recesses, a large one and a smaller one on either side. The centre one showed some part of a design which we took to be a coat-of-arms, as the plaster, which was left on the top, still showed a heraldic sort of design. The roof was tiled, the top rows were large pantile, the lower portion flat, small dark ones. This was in olden days one of the larger cotes and in summer and early autumn would contain many hundreds of pigeons.

Date: 1930

Organisation Reference: NCCE000667

Organisation: