Walking away from Rosyth Castle, across an abandoned rail track and up a wooded hill, I came across Rosyth Doocot almost hidden amongst the trees.
The
Doocot is from the Sixteenth Century and has over one thousand five hundred stone
nesting boxes inside for pigeons. It
must have been a pretty smelly place in its day, but the pigeons were a year
round source of meat and eggs for the local community.
The
Doocot is now empty except for some discarded beer cans and a couple of chairs
sitting inside. The chairs give it a
slightly surrealist feeling and I half expected a couple of actors to appear
from the side shadows and perform ‘Waiting for Godot’ or something of that ilk.
On
the lintel above the door are the remains of a carving of a serpent. This represents the old biblical saying of –
‘Be ye wise as serpents and harmless as doves.’
I
left a Skulferatu in the wall of the Doocot.
The
coordinates for the location of the Skulferatu are –
Latitude 56.024808
Longitude
-3.429101
I used the following sources for information on Rosyth Doocot –
The
Castellated and Domestic Architecture of Scotland from the
Twelfth to the Eighteenth Century, Volume One
By David MacGibbon and Thomas Ross
1887
Tourist Information at site