It is a dovecote, a structure whose primary purpose was the managed breeding of pigeons for their meat and dung, and this one is old enough to have been noted in a legal document drawn up shortly after its owner died.

The building is circular and slightly barrel-shaped in profile, standing around 5.2 metres tall with an external diameter of roughly 6.4 metres and walls nearly a metre thick, constructed from roughly coursed rubble. The roof is corbelled, meaning it was built by laying rings of stone that each project slightly inward over the one below until they meet at the top, forming a self-supporting dome without the use of mortar arches or timber. Two decorative string-courses, horizontal projecting bands of stone, run around the exterior at the base and midpoint of the roof. Entry for the keeper was through a flat-headed doorway on the west side; the birds, meanwhile, accessed the interior through a separate opening high on the south wall and left through a deliberate circular hole at the very apex of the roof. Inside, the walls are lined with small square nesting boxes, each roughly 20 centimetres wide and 36 centimetres deep, though most of those above about two metres have now collapsed. The dovecote appears in an Inquisition of 1609, cited by the historian Carrigan writing in 1905, which recorded buildings belonging to Richard Shee's manor of Glashcro, the earlier form of the placename Clashacrow. The buildings were seized following Shee's death in August 1608, and the mention of the dovecote in that document places its existence firmly in the early seventeenth century at the latest.

The structure sits within the demesne landscape of Wellbrook House, with the ruins of the medieval church and graveyard of Clashacrow close by to the south-west. The proximity of all three, a working estate, a place of worship, and a food-producing outbuilding of considerable technical sophistication, gives the site an unusual layered quality that rewards careful attention to what might otherwise read as a quiet and unremarkable field.