He has lived in the village all his life and still remembers the incendiary bomb attack which blew away the roof.

The Government replaced it with a flat, concrete slab and the dovecote, which had already fallen into disuse, was largely forgotten.

In those days, it belonged to a neighbouring farm but Mr Walpole (85), subsequently acquired the land and with it the neglected circular structure.

He said: "I have never seen one like it and I realised there were none like it in this area. I thought it would be interesting to restore it to the way it ought to be."

Lynn architect Richard Waite and the conservation officer at West Norfolk Council advised but relevant building regulations were hard to come by.

Mr Walpole's son, Paul, said dovecotes could be folly-like buildings but Mr Waite felt theirs was "very much a working building" and proposed a simple, pointed slate roof.

In their heyday, dovecotes were a common sight. Mr Rowland pointed out that 18th century records for the Manor of Terrington list ten"dove houses" among the 90 homes.

His example was built much later, around 1860, but young pigeons or "squabs" were still a valuable food source. Each pair of birds might have three or four clutches a year and their droppings were also collected and used as fertiliser.

Many of the bricks have "drain" stamped on them, linking their manufacture to the period when a tax was levied on clay bricks, unless they were for drainage works. The dovecote is clearly not a drainage tunnel, making the bricks "of questionable tax status".

Mr Walpole pointed out that it must have been very expensive to build due to the thickness of its walls and the intricacy of the L-shaped abodes, so desirable to pigeon parents. Contemporary cottages were less substantially constructed.

"The owner must have been well off and must have been expecting an income from it," he said. Conveniently, the pigeons could feed in any of the surrounding fields, not necessarily those belonging to their master.

Building the new roof is expected to take several weeks. It will not become a working dovecote again but Mr Walpole said he will be happy to show the completed building to members of the public interested in local history.