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Turnpike Barriers

Friday 15 April, 2011

News Brief

Spaggs Quiz
Which came first the Turnpike Staircase or the Turnpike Road?

Full Story:

A pike was a long wooden spear often with an iron clad point employed in close order battle with noted use in the Scottish Wars of Independence (1296 –1328)

At around this time the “turnpike” appeared in a number of guises. When built as a vertical shaft with protruding horizontal pikes, it was utilised as a barrier against horsemen, in effect forming an early hostile turnstile.

Clearly, whilst building your medieval castle it would have been much easier (and less expensive) to build a straight staircase from wood or stone to connect one floor level to another. However, in turbulent times this would be difficult to defend. A stone spiral staircase on the other hand had the security of being built within a wall, it narrowed access to one person at a time, and importantly whilst downward defence was easily accomplished, a right-handed swordsman had no way of attacking on a right-handed spiral stair. As with the turnstile, the staircase formed a physical barrier, and the name “turnpike staircase” was coined especially in Scotland.

Turnpike roads, i.e a road with a gated barrier that could be opened upon the payment of a toll were first seen in Hertfordshire around 1663, but following the General Turnpike Act of 1773 became a feature of UK roads until the coming of the railways in the mid 19th century.

Our interpretation is that the word “Turnpike” was generally used to refer to a “barrier” and its adoption to describe a spiral staircase pre-dates that to designate a gated road.

Our images show a modern Turnpike Spiral Staircase built to access the gate tower of Urquhart Castle on Loch Ness. We believe that our forebears would have been particularly impressed with this example, as not only would it have provided a defensible fireproof barrier, but it would also have had the advantage of being able to observe (and potentially boil!) unwelcome intruders.
We took the second image of a spectacular external cantilevered spiral access stairway made from slabs of slate at the stunning Laxey Wheel on the Isle of Man.

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