Gate
Also called: field gate, garden gate
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A gate is a hinged frame set into a fence, wall or hedge, built so that a gap in the boundary can be closed and then opened again without taking any part of the fence down. It is put together much like a light door, with a pair of upright side members called stiles joined by horizontal rails, but because one edge hangs unsupported on hinges rather than being fixed all round, a gate takes more strain than a door and its frame is braced accordingly.
Setting the width
How wide to make a gate is not fixed by any rule of the joint itself. Tredgold (1871) put the principle plainly: "The width of a gate depends upon the use made of the roadway or path which it crosses." Hasluck (1907) likewise treated the width as a matter of local circumstances rather than a standard measurement, to be decided by what the gate has to let through.
Bracing against sag
A gate's hinge side is fixed to a post, but the opposite edge, the one that swings free, has nothing under it, so the whole frame tends to drop at that corner over time. Riley (1905) describes a diagonal timber called a spur, fitted into the angle between the gate's front upright and its top rail at an angle of thirty degrees to the horizontal. A brace set across that corner in this way stiffens the frame against the sag that would otherwise develop at the free-swinging edge.
Hanging the gate
Hasluck (1907) describes hanging a gate on ordinary forged hooks and eyes, one half of each fixed to the gate's hanging stile and the other to the post, with the hardware bolted through using nuts and washers rather than simply screwed on.