I’m writing this a bit prematurely, i.e. before the video about the topic comes out, but I might be too busy the days following the video, so here we go:

Some weeks ago, I noticed a drawbar slot in the half-collapsed door of Donoughmore Church in Co. Kilkenny:

This was not the first time I noticed a drawbar slot, but to my recollection, the first time I noticed one in a church. Drawbar slots are usually square holes in doorways (but sometimes also windows, we’ll get there…) which were part of the defence system of a drawbar. If you try to remember a movie set in ye aulde mediaeval times where a castle gate is opened from the inside, they usually have to push the drawbar back into the wall, before they can do so. So, obviously, castles had them. But churches? Curious, I thought, and I mapped this one with https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:drawbar_slot=yes, adding it to the entrance tag (which means a lot of entrances get mapped, too). I tried to remember whether I had seen any more in other church ruins, went back through some of my mapillary footage (and was very glad I had recorded some of the sites, even in 360°) and found some more examples in churches.

I had partly read a PhD thesis about defensive structures in castles in South Kilkenny (John McCarthy: Castles in Space), where drawbars played a role. He mentions that because the drawbar slots could be up to 2m deep (that’s 6feet something in non-metric), even when the doorway was partly collapsed, you could still see parts of the drawbar slot and determine which doorway had drawbars. Because in castles - as in Irish towerhouses -, it wasn’t even only the ground floor level which had them, but first and second floor doorways could have them, too, just to be safe to be safe. (Btw, I have permission from John via LinkedIn message to transfer the information from his thesis onto OSM; I just haven’t gotten around to it yet. EDIT 25/10/2023: Done now.)

But anyway, obviously, you would find them in castles, so I’m not too interested in those. I started looking for them in churches, and I remembered that Rothe House, a merchant house in Kilkenny built between 1594 and 1610, also had one in the back door. I have since checked another merchant house from that time in Kilkenny, but it either never had a drawbar slot or it was bricked up. A.-K. D., CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

None of the churches in Kilkenny (city) seem to have them, which makes sense, because they were supposed to be protected by the city walls. Or they could be filled in by now thanks to later restoration works that didn’t appreciate the significance of drawbar slots.

I got talking to a friend who owns an old house (as in based on a towerhouse, then extended into a fortified house, then again extended and restored etc) in rural Kilkenny, and she said that they had them in their house. So I went for a visit, and they do! They have them in both kitchens (they don’t know why they have two kitchens either, don’t ask) and in some of the upstairs windows. This would have been a house owned by Protestants during the time of Penal Laws, when Catholics and their religion were suppressed. I then talked to my landlord and his wife (also Protestants) who both said that their home place (hers and his mother’s) had them and still had them in use. I was beginning to see a pattern there… My friend in the fortified house wouldn’t let me map her drawbar slots, unfortunately, but it is a private residence, so she has all the right to refuse that. So I won’t be recording the drawbar slots in private houses, but let it be recorded that they existed.

A.-K. D., CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (but actually photographed by a friend in Germany who gave permission to upload)

Back to the churches and other ecclesiastic buildings: I decided to focus on them, because they’re easier to access and to map. I’ve been going around looking at (originally) pre-Reformation churches mostly. I have a theory that the need for building in drawbar slots into church buildings (including abbeys etc) only arose with the Norman conquest of Ireland, because the few pre-Norman churches and round towers I have looked at don’t have them. Obviously, if you take land from the natives, they’re not going to be pleased, and you might want a secure refuge, i.e. defensible church or castle. Hence the need for drawbars. It’s too early to tell yet, and the doorways and windows don’t always survive in the ruins, but it will be an interesting thing to look at.

Here’s an overpass survey showing the sites surveyed with green being entrances and windows with drawbar slots and red without (just to show I have surveyed them): overpass-turbo

I have also photographed most of them for Wikimedia and created a new category for drawbar slots. So if anyone has photographed them in the past and wants to put them in that category, please do. There is also a wikidata item now which you can use to tag photos on Wikimedia.

Furthermore, I have made 3D models of some of them which you can find in my Sketchfab collection “Drawbar slots”. If you get the light right (with a torch shining into the drawbar slot), then the depth of them comes out really well in 3D. I haven’t linked any of those models (apart from one window and one entrance model) to OSM, because it might be going too far.

A drawbar slot in a church doorway in the side view, from “within the wall”

Tags used in relation to drawbar slots

• https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:entrance=yes or in rarer cases https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:window=yes
• https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:drawbar_slot=yes/no/double/blocked (if you can’t map the entrance for whatever reason, add drawbar_slot key to the building)
• drawbar_slot:depth
• width (of the doorway, to see how much deeper than necessary the drawbar slot is)
• level (not done consistently)
• url:sketchfab (only, if I have scanned the whole doorway or window)

I’d love to be able to run an overpass query filtering by building type (i.e. church/ castle/ house) with their building:architecture which have drawbar slots, but I don’t know how. If anyone can help, it would be much appreciated.

And thank you to my “driver” aka “research assistant” Dan who is just as stone mad as I am. I couldn’t cover as much ground without you.