There are a lot of pigeons in the French department of the Lot (pronounced, by the way "Loat", like "coat" or "boat", and not with a silent "t" as one would suppose). And with the pigeons, there are the Lot's distinctive pigeonniers (dovecotes).
Most often these pigeonniers are in the form of a square, steep-roofed tower attached to the end of a house. A farm house sitting in a grove of trees with a tower at one end looks (to us, at least) like mini-castles spread across the countryside.
A typical attached-tower pigeonnier is the red-tiled one in the first photo, from a house in the tiny hamlet of Beaumat.
The little village of Borreze, northwest of the town of Souillac, had this interesting variant (above), with a half-timbered pigeonnier tower, with a wooden bar for the birds to rest their weary legs on in front of the pigeon holes.
A striking version of a pigeonnier is the round tower, standing alone in a field in the midst of the countryside. Both of the examples here are located in the village of Frayssinet, north of Cahors and south of Rocamadour.
Many houses have integrated their pigeonnier into the end of the house without bothering with an add-on tower, as in this ancient example - again in the village of Frayssinet.
A more recent version of the end-of-the-house pigeonnier is in the end of this barn, in the hamlet of La Croix-Blanche, just down the road from Frayssinet.
Back to the village of Borreze and we find this interesting pigeonnier spread across the top of the main wall of a farm house in the center of the village. Each pigeon hole, or pair of pigeon holes, has its own stone porch for the comfort of the occupants.
Still in the village of Borreze we have a very creative pigeonnier built into the slate tiles of the roof itself. If our web-reduced photo isn't clear enough, the pigeon holes are the four dark holes across the bottom third of the roof.
On a hike out through the woods from the little village of montamel, north of Cahors and south of St Germain-du-Bel-Air, we passed an abandonded farm at Las Fargues, and found this wooden pigeonnier on the side of the barn. It was pretty high up, so there must have been access from the inside of the barn.
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