Luffness Doocot

Driving along Aberlady Bay, one of my favourite places, my eyes are usually out to sea, to see what I can see!

Today, for some reason, I spied, high through a missing stone in the wall, a domed kind of structure like a giant pepper pot!

I spun the car round filled with intrigue, and stopped in a wide drive, peeping through the fortuitously missing chunk of sandstone to spy the Luffness Doocot!

So many things are lovely about Scotland, and the term Doocot is certainly one of them - Doo for dove and cote, meaning small house.

A small house for a dove...but this is a big house for doves! Maybe a Doolodge or a Doomanse?

Such buildings are known by colloquial terms around the country and Culvery, Culverhouse and Culverhay are all terms used too, a culver being an Anglo Saxon term for pigeon. In Wales they are given the grand term of Cholomendy, but I'm sticking with Doocote 'cause it fits!

Everyone will be familiar with the notion of keeping doves for a pie, the pot, their eggs and their poop...a good dose of phosphorus, potassium and nitrogen. The poop helps with roots, shoots and fruits! And no one's going to shake their head at free fertiliser!

It was also used in the manufacture of gunpowder. Was Guy Fawkes a pigeon fancier?

The Doocot here at Luffness is, well, loveliness over a wall.

It was fully intact and looked like it had been cared for over the centuries, and it's stood in this spot for over three of them. Built in the 1600s, it's remarkable that this structure remains intact.

It's known as a Beehive Doocot and it's easy to see why. Its round and tapering dome shape looks like a larger-scale hive used for the keeping of bees. It must have felt like a shape that worked for things with wings! Behive Doocots are the earliest design of doocot, and most that have been around for over 300 years are this specific shape.

This one has two rat courses. Look at the thin bands around the structure that look like a belt around a big belly! They're slightly tilted and form a string course around the structure to prevent rats from climbing the walls and stealing the eggs or worse still, the pigeons themselves.

Luffness Doocot is a biggun at 5.5m high with great thick walls of around 1m. There's a cover on the roof known as a lantern, which is punctured with eight holes to allow the entry and exit of the birds.

Inside there is room for five hundred doves to cuddle up and make manure!

It's made of pretty coarse-looking rubble but is finished off at the top with a decorative little ruff of billet moulding, a common Norman design of rectangular notches sitting tight around the neck of the Doocot, making for a fancy finish to a functional structure. The laird still had an eye for design and keeping up with Campbells!

It was a obviously a bit of a treasured feature here at Luffness, as it looked cared for and kempt, standing in the well-manicured lawns in the sunlight.

And who knows, with the rising costs of comestibles, we my all have a return to our estate doocots and dove pie before long!

If you're in the Aberlady area, you're in for a treat as there are lots of lovely places to visit. Close to the Luffness Doocot, you'll find Luffness Water Tower and Luffness Friary, two real treasure trove places!